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WHY LOVE GROWS COLD 



WHY 
LOVE GROWS COLD 



BY 



ELLEN BURNS SHERMAN 




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> -" J -■ J J J J J 



NEW YORK 

A. WESSELS COMPANY 
1903 



THE »,(B<1Af1V Of 
Two CrtPisa* Rpoi5iv??(5 

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' COPY 8 



763^3 , 



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Copyright, 1903, by 
ELLEN BURNS SHERMAN 



Printed Sept., 1903 



CONTENTS 



d 

cl 

I. Just a Few of the Reasons Why 

"^^ Love -Grows Cold ii 

'^ 2. The Difference 'Twixt Word and Word 43 

3. Nature's Games of Hide-and-Seek . 68 

4. The Salt Lake of Literature ... 92 

5. Ethical Balances iii 

6. Several Words to the Wise .... 149 

7. Between the Lines 173 

8. Nature's Economies 190 

9. What's in an Eye 199 

10. The Devil's Fancy- Work 216 

.11. The Lifting of Veils in Literature . 239 



I am indebted to the proprietors of 
The Lamp and The Critic for courteous 
permission to include in this volume two 
essays which first appeared in those pub- 
lications. Acknowledgments are also due 
to The Criterion for permission to pla- 
giarize a few paragraphs from an article 
of mine which was published in its col- 
umns. 

E. B. S. 



DEDICATED TO MT BROTHER 

Cl^arUflf KolUn 

AND HIS WIFE 



JUST A FEW OF THE REASONS WHY 
LOVE GROWS COLD. 

(The looker-on sees more of the game than 
the players.) 

When one speaks of a rose, he may not 
immediately think of the endless varia- 
tions in size, color, fragrance and petal- 
formation which are found in the rose 
family, — from the simple wild flower to 
the deep-dyed Jacqueminot, clad in the 
rich complexity of its countless petals. 
And when one speaks of love, he seldom 
stops to consider the wide diversity of 
emotional coloring and fragrance which 
that term is made to cover — from the 
crude affinity of Maggie and Dennis to 
the intricate soular fusion of a Twentieth 
Century Margaret and her Reginald. For 
evolution has revealed the more delicate 

II 



Why Love Grows Cold 

workings of its laws in nothing so clearly 
as in the expansion and refinement of 
what is known, or unknown, as love. 

If one reads the romances of long ago, 
in which the heroine seldom speaks except 
in a sweet dialect of dimples, or the his- 
tories of his discreetly remote ancestors, 
he will find evidence enough to convince 
him that the difference between love, as 
it was in the beginning and now is, in 
its highest state, is the diff'erence between 
the elementary music of the first mono- 
chord and the complex harmonies of a 
modern piano. 

In the contemplation of this finer emo- 
tional efflorescence, one would like to feel 
an unqualified gladness, nor let his pleas- 
ant fancies be tripped up by such dogging 
maxims as, "For everything you gain 
you lose something." But, alas ! is it 
not so? Does not the increasing com- 
plexity of love, like the increasing com- 

12 



Just a Few of the Reasons 

plexity of everything else, make it the 
more easily deranged? 

Simple-hearted Addie, whose family 
crest is a washboard, once confessed to 
the writer that she "never begrudged the 
day" she "took Jim." "We've been mar- 
ried eleven years now," was the ingen- 
uous explanation, "and I ain't seen that 
man full yet." 

Verily, little satisfieth her that requir- 
eth little. 

"In the good old days," writes the bril- 
liant author of "The Ascent of Woman," 
"a girl embarked on her first passion 
with the firm conviction that it was go- 
ing to last a lifetime, and, as a result, it 
frequently did." But in these days of fear- 
ful enlightenment there is a very natural 
trepidation on the part of lovers, who 
stand and tremble on the brink and fear 
to launch away. For however much at 
variance in some respects may be the 

13 



Why Love Grows Cold 

testimony of those amorous experts, 
the poets and noveHsts, or the data fur- 
nished by the profane biographies of one's 
friends and kinsmen, on one character- 
istic of love there seems to be a painful 
unanimity of opinion; namely, its tend- 
ency to grow cold. 

Upon a question requiring answers which 
could not possibly be drawn from any 
single experience, it is meet to subpoena 
a cloud of witnesses from the inner ranks 
of the initiated, with scattering evidence 
from the outer ranks of lookers-on, who 
may sometimes speak with quite as much 
frankness and authority. 

In the longshoreman's testimony that 
"love, is not what it is cracked up to 
be — it's only the name it's got," and in 
the olympically resigned admission of the 
Concord seer, that love is "deciduous," 
one catches the same note of disappoint- 
ment which no amount of philosophy 

14 



Just a Few of the Reasons 

can wholly soften— a note that has sent 
its minor wail through fiction and life 
since the beginning of love and letters. 
If we turn to the poet, he answers in 
mournful meter, 

"Love swells like the Solway and ebbs like its tide." 

If we appeal to the psychologist, he re- 
plies with the cold candor of a theorem 
that all emotion is subject to periodicity. 

And yet, and yet, in the very disappoint- 
ment which is universally felt in the dis- 
covery of the transiency of love, there 
is a hidden assurance that somewhere 
another kind of love exists, correspond- 
ing to a higher expectation in the heart 
of man, — a love described in "A Summer 
in Arcady," "a love that remains faithful 
when the one of the two sits warm in 
the sun and the other lies cold in the 
shadow ; that burns on and on as a faith- 
ful, lonely flame in a worn-out broken 

15 



Why Love Grows Cold 

lamp, and that asks, as its utmost desire, 
for a life throughout eternity, spirit with 
spirit." Such an affection is again and 
again acknowledged by Shakespere: 

" Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds." 
" Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, 
But bears it out even to the edge of doom." 

Nor need one draw his conclusions on 
the subject exclusively from the fancies 
of a poet, even when that poet is Shake- 
spere. For the mature man can rarely 
be found who has not, in the course of 
his travels, discovered in some wise or 
simple Darby and Joan — if not in himself 
— the living realization of the Shakespere- 
an ideal. From the further considera- 
tion, however, of the ideal type of love 
this paper is debarred by its title, which 
restricts its investigations to a less ideal 
kind that does not bear it out to the 
edge of doom. But a few comforting 
concessions seemed called for, before the 

i6 



Just a Few of the Reasons 

reader was asked to wander in the thorny 
paths which lead away from the delecta- 
ble lands of love into the cold, bleak 
regions of indifference and hate. 

Though a hundred little roads lead to 
this much-discovered country, the broad- 
est thoroughfares begin at the gates 
marked Familiarity, Wealth, Poverty, 
Selfishness, Duplicity, Naggishness, and 
False Pride. 

On the subject of familiarity, the poet 
and the proverb-maker (may they per- 
ish who say our good things before us ! ) 
have forestalled our own Solomonizings 
by such harrowing couplets as, 

"When each the other shall avoid 
Shall each by each be most enjoyed," 

and 

"The toy so fiercely sought 
Hath lost its charm by being caught," 

which is only a free translation of omne 
ignotum pro magnifico, or no man is a hero 
to his valet. So long as there is a consid- 

17 



Why Love Grows Cold 

erable territory in the mind and soul of 
a man or a woman which can be marked 
"Unknown Regions/' as the extreme polar 
spaces are charted on the maps, the dan- 
gers of familiarity will not be fatal. But 
alas for the day when all the unknown 
regions have been explored, and curiosity 
and interest have gone ashore with no 
further incentive to discovery ! The charm 
of expectancy which interlines the first 
chapter of a new book may never be du- 
plicated in a second reading. But lest 
this should sound disheartening, let one 
bear in mind that there are many men 
and women whose last chapter it takes 
a lifetime to reach. On the other hand, 
some men and women have very few read- 
able chapters beyond their facial preface. 
But coming to the end of the last chapter 
is only one of the dangers of the inevi- 
table day-after-dayness of matrimony. 
A lady whose wisdom is the fruitage of 

i8 



Just a Few of the Reasons 

thirty happy years of married Hfe testifies 
that a large percentage of matrimonial re- 
verses grow out of a lack of reserve and 
courtesy, a verdict which is quaintly in- 
dorsed by Robert Burdette in one of his 
New Year's resolutions : "I will be as polite 
to my wife as though she were a perfect 
stranger." A recognition of the same 
lurking danger under discussion may be 
found in one of Lamb's letters : "But 
there is a monotony in the affections, 
which people living together are apt to 
give in to; a sort of indifference in the 
expression of kindness for each other, 
which demands that we should some- 
times call to our aid the trickery of 
surprise." 

There are still other causes in familiar- 
ity, lying outside the habits and char- 
acteristics of those who love each other, 
which help to wear threadbare the beau- 
tiful patterns which love has woven. A 

19 



Why Love Grows Cold 

sameness of material circumstance and 
background is as monotonous as a same- 
ness or blankness of mind and soul. 

My friend Mirva, who has a mathemat- 
ical fancy, once computed the probable 
number of meals which Hiram and Mariah 
had eaten vis-a-vis during the fifty-two 
years of their wedded weal. The result, 
making random allowance for illness and 
casual absences, was fifty-four thousand, 
seven hundred and fifty. Mirva declares 
that no thougthful man or woman can face 
such appalling figures without flinching. 
"To think," continues that lady, "of hav- 
ing the prose of a menu thrust three times 
daily between two people who have been 
taught— by novelists— to think of love 
against the background of a vine-clad, 
moon-lit veranda, with dim music in the 
distance!" 

Of course, Mirva was only airing her 
fancies; for she afterward confessed in 

20 



Just a Few of the Reasons 

confidence that she happened to know 
just one man with whom she would dare 
risk taking fifty thousand meals vis-a- 
vis. Nearly every woman knows one such 
man. At the same time she suggested 
that married people would do well to go 
camping or picnicking occasionally to 
break up the table side of matrimonial 
monotony. Mirva also has a theory 
that married people should have an ex- 
tremely varied wardrobe to diversify their 
personalities for each other's benefit; and 
lastly, that they should resolutely take 
vacations from each other whenever their 
golden chains begin to chafe. This ar- 
gument Mirva reinforces by some in- 
teresting statistics. In the course of her 
travels she has been making a list of 
happy couples, young and old, that have 
come under her observation, and out of 
the forty thus collected, thirty are cases 
where the husband is absent all day long, 

21 



Why Love Grows Cold 

or for longer periods of days, weeks, 
or sometimes months. 

By the unclouded light of such statis- 
tics, Emerson's warning that lovers should 
keep their strangeness, cannot be inter- 
preted, even by the crassest reader, as 
the mere expression of anaemic aloof- 
ness, but rather as a wise protest which 
would stay the rash soul ready to barter 
the purple twilight of the gods for the gar- 
ish certainties of mortal noonday. Match- 
ing with beautiful psychological nicety the 
warning given by Emerson, is the com- 
mentary of a woman whose emotional 
deeps continually irrigated the soil in 
which her genius flourished. "The explic- 
itness of an engagement," wrote George 
Eliot, "wears off the finest edge of sus- 
ceptibility; it is jasmine, gathered and 
presented in a large bouquet." 

Even Thoreau, though his illumination 
was not produced by conjugal friction, 

22 



Just a Few of the Reasons 

had used his eyes enough to be able 
to confirm the verdicts already rendered : 
"We meet at short intervals," he wrote, 
"not having had time to acquire any 
new value for each other." Finally, na- 
ture herself gives us an admonitory hint 
of the intermittent capacity of every- 
thing, when she lets a pearl lose its lus- 
ter, if it is not submerged now and then 
in the revivifying ocean to recover its 
fading iridescence. 

Yet the most willing obedience to all 
these hints will not avail in those cases 
where the poppy-like transiency of love 
is due to a fatal twist in the tempera- 
ment of the lover or the loved. For some 
men and women are like children who ex- 
haust, with abnormal rapidity, the pos- 
sibilities of enjoyment in each new play- 
thing that is given them. One child will 
play a few minutes with a beautiful toy? 
then tear it to pieces and throw it away, 

23 



Why Love Grows Cold 

evincing almost as little compunction as 
Henry VIII. felt in discarding his wives. 
Another child will play for years with a 
sorry-faced doll, exhibiting toward it the 
same tender constancy displayed by Dr. 
Johnson, when he continued to call his 
wife "pretty, dear creature," long past 
the time when the term was accurate, 
if it ever was. 

The case of the fickle man or woman 
is of all most hopeless, since neither ever 
learns, apparently, that what has hap- 
pened twice, thrice, or a dozen times, will, 
in all human probability, happen again. 
So love, to the inconstant, is always a 
will-o'-the-wisp, which lures its victims into 
bogs and swamps. 

"Ah! if my wife were only like Miss 
Fata Morgana," sighs Sir Fickle, not 
knowing that should Miss Fata Morgana 
become Lady Fickle, he would in still 
briefer time than before be sighing, "Ah! 

24 



Just a Few of the Reasons 

if my wife were only like Miss or Mrs. 
Mirage!" 

It must be confessed, however, that even 
the most constant men and women can- 
not escape a perplexing amount of elusive- 
ness in the moods which they would fain 
entice to permanency. To this tune 
sings Lowell, in "The Cathedral," "For 
me, once felt is so felt nevermore." Em- 
erson, too, who might have been expected 
to shed a steady, incandescent light upon 
the objects of his regard, confesses that 
when one has once seen a picture he must 
take leave of it, for he will never see it 
again. 

The causes underlying these experiences 
have been elaborated by Professor James, 
in his own beguiling style : "Our sensa- 
tions," he writes, "following the muta- 
tions of our capacity for feeling, are al- 
ways undergoing an essential change. . . . 
For an identical sensation to recur, it 

25 



Why Love Grows Cold 

would have to occur the second time in 
an unmodified brain. But as this, strictly 
speaking, is a physiological impossibility, 
so is an unmodified feeling an impossi- 
bility; for to every brain modification, 
however small, must correspond a change 
of equal amount in the feeling which the 
brain subserves. 

"All this would be true if even sensa- 
tions came to us pure and simple, and 
not combined into ^things.' Even then 
we should have to confess that, however 
we might in ordinary conversation speak 
of getting the same sensation again, we 
never in strict theoretic accuracy could 
do so, and that whatever was true of the 
river of life, of the river of elementary feel- 
ing, it would certainly be true to say, 
like Heraclitus, that we never descend 
twice into the same stream." . . . 

Often we are ourselves struck at the 
strange differences in our successive views 

26 



Just a Few of the Reasons 

of the same thing." . . . "From one year 
to another w& see things in new lights. 
What was unreal has grown real, and 
what was exciting is insipid. The friends 
we used to care the world for are shrunk- 
en to shadows." ... "The young girls 
that brought an aura of infinity, at pres- 
ent hardly distinguishable existences." . . . 
"Experience is remolding us every mo- 
ment, and our mental reaction on every 
given thing is really a resultant of our 
experience of the whole world up to that 
date." 

Since it is then obvious that poor har- 
ried mortals must have a "mental reac- 
tion," nilly-willy, on every given thing 
with which they come in contact, there 
is very evident propriety in limiting the 
considerations of this paper to just a 
few of the reasons why love grows cold. 
To those reasons we again turn, pausing 
at the second gate of peril marked Wealth. 

27 



Why Love Grows Cold 

Here we shall need but the simplest road- 
side logic to convince us that a need- 
lessly large income is a menace to love. 
For the question is not, how hardly shall 
they that are rich enter into the king- 
dom of Cupid, but how hardly shall they 
remain in, when once they have entered. 
For their overabundance of leisure too 
often delivers them over to a surfeit of 
acquaintance from which the working- 
man is saved. 

Moreover, the traditional employer of 
idle hands attends to the rich man's case, 
and is ready to show him where the prim- 
rose paths of dalliance lie. 

On the other hand, poverty as an amor- 
ous damper is even more effectual than 
riches, since no plant can long thrive in 
a hard, unsunned, and unwatered soil. 
A certain amount of leisure and freedom 
from anxiety is indispensable to the bare 
existence, not to say growth, of love. 

2S 



Just a Few of the Reasons 

For how can minds, continually pre-empted 
by sordid visions of bills for rent, coal, 
and groceries, find room for the entertain- 
ment of gentler emotions? Time is as 
necessary to love well as to do anything 
else well. In this connection, observe the 
sanity of Agur^s supplication, "Give me 
neither poverty nor riches." 

Yet even when love is nested in the 
juste milieu between poverty and riches, 
it may be far from \h.^ juste milieu of tem- 
perament. With the most perfect lubrica- 
tion of the material axes of love, what 
magic oil can still the creakings that are 
caused by a nagging disposition, or the 
friction generated by a conflict between 
sordid ideals and high ones? 

If memory, or the law of association, 
were less inexorable in its workings, the 
consequences which follow nagging would 
be less fatal to love. But the thing re- 
ceived, be it pleasant or unpleasant, is 

29 



Why Love Grows Cold 

so unavoidably associated with the per- 
son who gives it, that height, nor depth, 
nor any other creature, can prevent 
the identification of the pain or the pleas- 
ure with its cause. Nor is this pain always 
the result of aggressive unkindness. Neg- 
ative qualities, as everybody knows, are 
frequently as galling as positive ones. 
Plutarch tells of a man who divorced, 
without apparent cause, a wife both beau- 
tiful and virtuous ; but when he was plied 
for a reason, he answered by raising his 
foot, and asking if any one could tell 
where the shoe pinched. 

Something of the same purport may be 
found in an essay which is not less pro- 
found because there are ripples on its 
surface, by Max O'Rell, who declares that 
"love is a fragile flower that is revived 
by a mere sigh, shattered by a mere 
breath," . . . "feeds on trifles, and lives 
on illusions." 

30 



Just a Few of the Reasons 

When it is remembered that the trifles 
upon which love feeds are never the same 
in any two cases of amat and amatury 
the original complexity of the problem 
of keeping love alive becomes desperately 
manifest. The lover's sensitiveness and 
delicacy of perception, which delight the 
heart of the woman who loves him, may 
also torture her with the disillusions of 
their discoveries. For love is less blind 
than the traditions which make him so, 
seeing, rather, with the anointed eye which 
discerns the difference which a difference 
makes. Be it only an accent, a gesture, 
or a ribbon too much, and straightway 
he droops, like the mimosa genus to which 
he belongs. In a recent work of fiction 
the decline of the hero's love begins with 
the discovery that the chaussure of his 
beautiful sweetheart is not always irre- 
proachable. Musing in the key of ex pede^ 
he develops a theory which is later sub- 

31 



Why Love Grows Cold 

stantiated by the remembrance of a not 
impeccable lace tie, and the sequel is es- 
trangement. The Diary of Judge Sewell 
records a kindred case of disenchantment, 
following the lover's vision of his be- 
trothed, deposed by an apron that bore 
state's evidence against its wearer. 

Not less sensitive is love to a lack of 
freshness in the apparel of the thoughts 
and feelings. Words and phrases — as well 
as aprons — may be worn too long, and 
as the more intimate raiment of the soul 
itself are more indicative of the man than 
the apparel which oft proclaims him. 
On this point Rostand has given the world 
some very much needed illumination in 
his "Cyrano de Bergerac," making it for- 
ever clear to those who can follow him, 
that a man's feelings rarely outstrip 
his thinkings and their verbal expres- 
sion. In a word, that a man's emo- 
tional gamut is fairly well indexed by his 

32 



Just a Few of the Reasons 

thought and his abiHty to express that 
thought. 

This fact is admirably brought out in 
the characters of Cyrano and Christian. 
The greater intellectual and emotional 
range of the former exhibits itself in lan- 
guage befitting its greatness. Christian, 
having only an octave of thoughts and 
feelings, must, perforce, play so monot- 
onously that Roxane wearies of him and 
his shallow harmonies, which would have 
satisfied the soul of a more shallow 
woman. 

But while Christian has hardly origi- 
nality and initiative enough to compose 
a kiss-^ith every stimulus to aid him — 
Cyrano can give a verbal definition of 
one, which is more responsible for the 
responsiveness of Roxane' s lips than the 
real kiss left upon them by Christian. 

Aurora Elberta, another heroine less 
famous than Roxane, confessed to her 

3 33 



Why Love Grows Cold 

diary that the first symptom of a dimin- 
uendo in her love came with the slight 
chafing produced by her lover's invaria- 
ble habit of beginning his letters with " My 
darling," and ending them no less change- 
lessly with the words "Fondly ever." 

"After the first forty letters," Aurora 
explained, "I felt like suggesting that 
Robert should use a printing stamp for 
the beginning and ending of his letters; 
but I refrained, remembering his sensi- 
tiveness, and tried to cajole myself into 
the belief that such constancy of expres- 
sion must argue constancy of affection, 
despite the baser suggestion of an imp 
of fancy that verbal constancy might 
argue instead a dangerous mental in- 
ertia." 

If clouds like these can chase the bow- 
god's smile, what length of countenance 
may he be expected to wear, when he is 
see-sawed by the alien ideals of those who 

34 



Just a Few of the Reasons 

are unequally yoked ? Hymen, expert en- 
gineer as he is, cannot build a bridge 
long enough to span the gulf between 
the Mr. and Mrs. Lydgates that may 
be found in every large community. 
One would fain believe that such unequal 
yokings are of rare occurrence, and accept 
without dissent the poetical philosophy : 



" Silver to silver creep and wind, 
And kind to kind. 
Nor less the eternal poles 
Of tendency distribute souls." 



But, alas ! good poet, how many souls 
are distributed by the eternal poles of 
tendency, and how many by the reckless 
toss and pitch of that capricious Jabber- 
wock. Propinquity? Beyond a peradven- 
ture, there are cases like yours and mine, 
my discriminating reader, where the soul's 
invisible antennae are so sensitive that 
they can detect the deep and subtle dif- 
ference between the eternal poles of tend- 

35 



Why Love Grows Cold 

ency and the transitory propulsions of 
propinquity. The average man, however, 
especially in the callow days of youth, is 
usually entirely lacking in the power to 
discriminate between an eternal tendency 
and a temporal penchant. Such a power 
of divination may be latent in many who 
do not give themselves time to let it de- 
velop. Hence the endless line of matrimo- 
nial burlesques, comedies, and tragedies, 
which are daily enacted in the woes of 
the wedded. What candid reader of life 
or newspapers would maintain that an 
eternal tendency presided over the choice 
of the soulful Professor Myope, who 
hitched his star to a wagon, when he 
mated, or the quicksand attachment be- 
tween the radiant Lady Silvia and a 
moral troglodyte? 

In all such cases one does not need 
to ask why love grows cold, for the an- 
swer is written upon the face of the con- 

36 



Just a Few of the Reasons 

ditions. Again, who could look for a 
basis of permanency in an affection built 
upon ideals like these, taken from life : 
" The girl I marry must have small feet," 
and "I won't marry any man who isn't 
rich and handsome." 

Not only is there danger in the cheap 
ideals which lovers cherish of each other, 
but also in their notions of post-connu- 
bial happiness. On their own confession, 
many married people expect and hope to 
feel an undeviating temperature in their 
affections, when the probability is that 
it is neither possible not desirable that 
love should constantly register the same 
degree Amorheit. One would weary of a 
physical atmosphere always at the same 
mark. Why not also of a psychical one? 
Hence the unwisdom of alarm, when an 
occasional difference causes a mist in 
Cupid's barometer. 

For a genuine case of love in decline 

37 



Why Love Grows Cold 

a plain old-fashioned Christian prescrip- 
tion of Golden Rule has been known to 
suffice. But there are cases where the 
disease is more insidious and love is mys- 
teriously veered from its pivotage, much 
as the needle of a compass is deflected 
by unseen ground-currents. Hardly less 
inscrutable are some of the agencies that 
have served to resuscitate a love appar- 
ently long deceased. A kind of affection, 
which might be called dog-in-the-manger- 
love, is peculiarly susceptible to this kind 
of awakening. Let us suppose that Mr. 
Philistine Smug perceives that there are 
two young men who would like to win 
the hand of Miss Double Entry, to whom 
he is making his suit. Being a man with- 
out much originality of perception or 
appreciation, he is quite as much influenced 
by the admiration of his rivals as by the 
intrinsic attractions of Miss Double Entry. 
But let him win the lady in question, 

3^ 



Just a Few of the Reasons 

and let the other suitors go on their way 
surviving. 

Gradually Mr. Smug's affection, which 
never had any very adequate raison d'etre, 
lapses into a very torpid condition. But 
the wheels of chance again bring one of 
the rejected suitors into the Smug neigh- 
borhood, and another chance allows Mr. 
Smug to witness an accidental encounter 
between Lady Smug and her whilom ad- 
mirer. A very slight incident, but not 
so in its result. Mrs. Smug is suddenly 
overwhelmed with lavishments of tender- 
ness from her husband. If she does not 
inquire too closely into the genesis of this 
tender awakening, Mrs. Smug may find 
pleasure in it; but if she is one who looks 
for causes (which could hardly be expected 
in a woman who had married Mr. Smug), 
one cannot envy her her musings. 

It may seem almost like profanity to 
designate as love the bond of union be- 

39 



Why Love Grows Cold 

tween two people of the Smug genus. But 
the study of the rise and fall of even a 
Smug emotion is not without interest and 
significance to the student of causes. For 
there are also fluctuations and changes in 
the affections of those who are many re- 
moves from the Smug plane of suscepti- 
bility. 

On a higher plane of emotion it often 
happens that what is mistaken for a 
decline in love is, in reality, only its pass- 
ing into a state of self-unconsciousness. 
When a child begins to walk, he is glee- 
fully conscious of every step; but later, 
his walking becomes wholly automatic. 
In like manner when two people first love 
each other they may feel in the fact an 
exuberant consciousness, which by degrees 
passes away, and in its passing they 
imagine that love, too, is gone, and can 
scarcely be convinced of their error, save 
by the testimony of an absence, or a severe 

40 



Just a Few of the Reasons 

illness, or some other circumstance which 
reveals the true condition of their hearts. 

So the man who is secretly sighing 
over the apparent passing of love would 
do well to put his feeling to the test by 
absence, if no other method offers, before 
writing hie jacet over the empty grave 
of love. In several cases out of many 
there will be a discovery which will rhyme 
very well with the sequel to the Ocean's 
quarrel with the Land : 

"I'm done with thee," said the Ocean. 

"As it please thee, my lord," replied 
the Land; "try rolling awhile without 



me." 



So the Ocean leaped, roared, tossed, 
and stormed, in a mighty effort to break 
away from the Earth, till at last he gently 
sank back to her arms, penitently sigh- 
ing, as he caressed her : 

"Thou art more of myself than I, my 
love." 

41 



Why Love Grows Cold 

"And less am I of myself than thou," 
answered the whispering Earth. 

" Dost know the hidden bond that holds 
us thus together?" murmured the Ocean. 

"The Little Mortals call it love," she 
said. 



42 



THE DIFFERENCE 'TWIXT WORD 
AND WORD. 

It is one of Mr. Howells's characters, 
I believe, who says that there is very 
little difference between any two people, 
but what little difference there is, is very 
important. The same principle has a 
still closer application in the realm of 
rhetoric. There may be very little dif- 
ference between two synonymous words, 
but what little difference there is, is very 
important, for in it lies all that from a 
literary point of view is known as style, 
or, from a social point of view, as tact. 
For the latter quality is seldom possible 
without a nice ear for the delicate dis- 
tinctions of implication that exist in the 
marvelously graded scale of adjectives 
that have come into most languages in 

43 



Why Love Grows Cold 

response to the subtle needs of sensitive 
people. 

To cite a common instance, "fat" and 
"lean," with options in "skinny" and 
"bony," may have answered the purpose 
very well in the guileless beginnings of a 
language, when a crude race used it; and 
even now, in the rural fastnesses of the 
earth, where golden-rod is known as "yel- 
low-top," one may find many people whose 
vocabulary is innocent of any but very 
primitive distinctions. But even as the 
modern loom has given us a countless 
variety of fabrics, from the heaviest frieze 
to the most filmy muslin and silk, in 
place of the rough homespun of other 
days, so the adjectives and descriptive 
phrases of a perverse and cultivated gen- 
eration show a more delicate and varied 
mental weave, reflecting the finer require- 
ments of finer usage. 

Instead of "fat" or "lean," verbal so- 

44 



Difference 'Twixt Word and Word 

phistication softens unpleasant verities by 
such variations as, "well-conditioned," 
"plump," "stout," "stocky," "portly," 
"thick-set," "full-figured," "massive," 
^^ embonpoint^^ or, in an unavoidable 
extremity, "corpulent" and "rotund," 
while, shading away from "lean" or 
" skinny," it has " thin," " spare," " slight," 
"slender," "shadowy," "frail," "fragile,' 
or "emaciated." 

Among such adjectives the tactful man 
instinctively feels his way, and rarely says 
* ^glutton" for '' bon-vivant,^'' "thin as a 
rail" when " slender" would have answered 
his purpose, or "fat" when "plump" or 
^^ embonpoinf would have veiled his mean- 
ing without hiding its import. 

So copious and adjustable in its verbal 
niceties has language become that a single 
remark containing an adjective or a de- 
scriptive phrase will often give the key 
to a man's mind and character. When a 

45 



Why Love Grows Cold 

woman's descriptive vocabulary is ex- 
hausted by "nice" or "very pretty," 
with antonyms in "nasty" and "horrid," 
one is furnished with a fairly accurate 
chart of her mental and moral bound- 
aries. Especially significant in their reve- 
lation of character are the adjectives 
which a woman applies to another woman, 
or those which a man uses in speaking 
of another man. A feminine nose, to 
which a man refers as '' slightly retrousse^'' 
is a "turnup" when a certain kind of un- 
kind woman mentions it. This same 
kind of woman speaks of full or protrud- 
ing eyes, as "bulgy," or "fishy," and the 
lithe or willowy maid she dubs "loose- 
jointed." 

How much, too, is revealed by one's 
allusions to those who have come "within 
range of the rifle-pits." An "old fogy" 
and an "elderly gentleman" may some- 
times mean about the same, but one can 

46 



Difference 'Twixt Word and Word 

imagine that it would be far more pleas- 
ant to live with the man or woman who 
used the latter expression. 

One of the most familiar illustrations 
of the delicately evasive possibilities of 
language is found in the last chapter of 
Ecclesiastes. 

Many other passages in the Bible and 
the classics show how, in all ages, lan- 
guage has recorded the instinctive recoil 
from the bald harsh statement of un- 
pleasant or unpalatable truths, seeking 
"by indirections to find directions out." 
In connivance with this motive are all the 
classic and Scriptural equivalents for death 
and dying. When the messenger reports 
Absalom's condition to David, he does not 
say that he is dead, but uses that most 
tactful circumlocution, ^^The enemies of 
my lord the King, and all that rise against 
thee to do thee hurt, be as that young 



man is." 



47 



Why Love Grows Cold 

The use of sleep for the slumber which 
Jeremiah calls "perpetual sleep" is also 
common in almost all languages. Not only 
for death, but for many other conditions, 
language is disposed to coin soft and 
alleviating terms. To the toper's nearest 
of kin, words like "intoxicated" and "in- 
ebriated" are a trifle less brutal than 
the shorter monosyllable which records 
that state of unbeing. In response to 
similar needs of the sensitive people who 
have acquired wealth too rapidly, language 
supplies all those muffled equivalents for 
theft and robbery, like "accumulation," 
" conveyance," " defalcation," " appro- 
priation," and "embezzlement." 

So the semi-pet names, " Deil," " Clootie" 
and " Nickie-ben," carry with them sug- 
gestions of easy-going tolerance and a tacit 
acknowledgment of humanity's naughty 
camaraderie with the Prince of Darkness, 
a camaraderie that would e'en find re- 

48 



Difference 'Twixt Word and Word 

deeming traits and a ground for a larger 
hope in a crony of so dark a color. Alto- 
gether different is the stern effect of the 
uncompromising names, Devil and Satan — 
words devoid of any suggestion of moral 
coquetry or concession. 

Of kindred interest, in connection with 
the study of the verbal make-weights 
of language, are all the words that mark 
the gradual transition of a virtue into 
a vice. The same praiseworthy quality 
that starts out as '^ thrift," if increased 
ever so slightly, becomes "frugality," and 
then by still more unseemly increments 
passes into parsimoniousness, close-fisted- 
ness, stinginess, and downright miserli- 
ness. In this instance, as in almost every 
other, there seems to be a redundancy 
of epithets applicable to a virtue in its 
sag-end estate compared with those that 
describe it in its pristine condition. 

But whether one is to infer from this 

4 49 



Why Love Grows Cold 

that there are more illustrations of vices 
than of virtues, or that the indignation 
of virtuous onlookers finds vent in coin- 
ing terms of opprobrium, deponent doth 
not say. Another case in point is fur- 
nished by the long list of labels applied to 
the insane, while one or two serve to des- 
ignate the sane. Besides demented, un- 
hinged, unbalanced, crazy, raving and 
non compos mentis^ there is a long series 
known to slanguage, such as '* wheels," 
"nutty," "batty," "cracked,' "addle- 
pated," "a screw loose," "not all there," 
"no wick in his lamp," "bats in his 
belfry," "wool in his thinker," and "bub- 
bles in his think-tank." 

Not a little of the art of administering 
the soft answer, enjoined by Scripture, 
depends upon one's ear for detecting the 
feather-fine distinctions that lurk under 
the more obvious meaning of words. Such 
a genius presides over all those neatly 

SO 



DijfFerence 'Twixt Word and Word 

evasive phrases which abounds in the 
French language. Sleeping a la belle 
etoile sounds so much less like a rigor- 
ous extremity than if otherwise stated; 
while "giving one the key of the fields" 
is a far daintier form of dismissal than 
sending one "about his business." 

Belle mere is another innocent subter- 
fuge of this tender tongued race — a word 
doubtless built upon the same propitiating 
principle of derivation which inspired the 
Eumeuides, Another instance of the same 
racial delicacy of diction was furnished 
by the reply of a pallid Frenchman on 
his first sea-voyage; 

"Have you breakfasted?" inquired a 
fellow-passenger. 

"On the contrary," was the faint re- 
sponse. 

Even in the baldly prosaic walks of life 
the potency of the little less and the little 
more is recognized. A New York business 

SI 



Why Love Grows Cold 

firm, advertising for an office-manager, 
once made use of the diplomatic circum- 
ocution, "Wanted a widow or otherP 
Again, the shopkeeper, when he marks 
his goods, is keenly aware of the fictitious 
magnitude which the difference between 
ninety-nine cents and one dollar assumes 
to the ear of the average shopper. The 
physician, in like manner, when he makes 
out his prescription in abbreviated Latin, 
or darkly mysterious chemical symbols, 
gives himself the wink whenever he hap- 
pens to think how much of its thera- 
peutic value would be lost were it trans- 
lated into the noonday candor of common 
speech. And eke the lawyer, the political 
orator, and clergyman will admit that 
the winning of a case, an election, or a 
soul may depend upon the effective tour- 
nure of a phrase, the discriminating choice 
of a single word, or the dove-like into- 
nation of its delivery. 

52 



Difference 'Twixt Word and Word 

But it is the poets most of all who profit 
by a knowledge of the little less and the 
little more that are such worlds away. 
Let one attempt to change but one word 
in the sublimely pitched and stately meas- 
ured cadences of the ninetieth and ninety- 
first psalms, and what rhetorical discord 
would ensue ! There are many other words 
that may be used for dwelling-place, when 
one speaks of the human habitations of 
man. But here dwelling-place is the word 
inevitable, the only one that satisfies the 
ear of sense and soul, with its suggestion 
of breadth without boundaries in space 
or time. 

Still closer to absolute perfection of 
diction is the magnificent sweep of the 
words, "From everlasting to everlasting 
Thou art God." 

One feels a pulse of sympathy for the 
clergyman who prefaces his own remarks 
with the reading of either of these two 

53 



Why Love Grows Cold 

marvelous psalms. The unavoidable anti- 
climax that results in almost every case 
may well account for the custom of build- 
ing a long bridge of hymns and prayer 
to carry the audience safely over the fear- 
ful chasm and steep declivity that lie be- 
tween these psalms and the average ser- 
mon of the average clergyman. 

A similar sensation is felt when one 
passes from the rhetorical peaks of Shake- 
spere to the literary lowlands of light 
modern fiction. To avoid the mental 
jolt of such a transition, one needs to con- 
struct a carefully cogged train of authors 
by which he may compass the descent 
with safety. The passage likewise, from 
one language or dialect to another, as 
any reader of the smoothest translation 
knows, is a continual series of rhetorical 
"thank-you ma'ams," that rack the 
mental joints of memory and association, 
even when the languages are as closely 

54 



Difference 'Twixt Word and Word 

allied as the English and Scotch. What 
singer would dare to swindle an audience 
with an English rendering of "Annie 
Laurie," "Bonnie Doon," "Bide Awee," 
or any of the wistful Scotch lays that 
lilt their way into the ear like the lave- 
rock's morning song? 

And where were half the humor and 
pathos of the tales of Jamie Soutar, Drum- 
sheugh, and Weelum Maclure, without 
the depth, strength, and tenderness which 
inhere in their sturdy speech? 

When a man of such stalwart principles 
as Burnbrae says, "dinna greet," to his 
gude wife, one feels a double tenderness 
in the word for which there is no English 
equivalent. It is, indeed, along the line of 
tender, caressing syllables that the English 
language is most deficient. By ever so 
slight vowel variations, the Scotch may 
wand into existence a poetical vocabulary 
whose manifest destiny is the chronicling 

55 



Why Love Grows Cold 

of fond sighs and life-long heartaches. 
Compare the random parallel vocabularies 
here given and it would not be difficult 
to believe that even a Scotch dictionary 
might move to tears a susceptible and 



-gmative rti 
dee 


laer 




. die 


slippit awa' 




. passed away 


bairnies 




. children 


lassie 






. girl 


laddie 






. boy 


dinna 






. don't 


canna 






. can't 


mither 






, mother 


auld . 






. old 


sae 






. so 


sair 






sore 



The German language, also, is especially 
rich in all those haunting words that 
echo so accurately the general alas-ness 
and nevermore-ness, which checker life 
and characterize the poetical outbreaks 

56 



Difference 'Twixt Word and Word 

of lovers. How brief and consolable seems 
the woe recorded in the EngHsh words, 
lost, gone, or even vanished, compared 
with the three-syllabled reverberations of 
dolor that die away in such words as 
vergangeUy verloren^ verschwundeUy and nim- 
mermehr. 

Of course, the real poet will find poetic 
words in any language, or coin them 
himself— words which the proser can never 
discover. Amos Jiggins and Edgar Allan 
Poe may use the same dictionary, but the 
singing words will never find their way 
to the pen of Mr. Jiggins. Like the sun- 
flower and violet, that draw their dif- 
ferent textures and coloring from the 
same soil, every mind, by equally subtle 
processes of affinity, draws from the 
mother-language the material for its 
own peculiar verbal efflorescence. 

When all other pages have been thumbed, 
rhetoricians will find no text-book so full 

57 



Why Love Grows Cold 

of hints on the little less and more as 
the wonder-volumes edited by Nature. 
Study her green or amber pages, as she 
begins to tell you a story in the quiet 
prose of a field of grass or barley. Will 
she let the tale grow tedious by an un- 
varied repetition of grassy commonplaces ? 

Not she. After she has calmed you 
with a few still paragraphs, she wafts a 
gentle breeze over the fields, and ripples 
her prose into green and golden waves 
of poetry, or anon sends a cheerful bird, 
bumblebee, or butterfly to annotate her 
chapters. By what slight changes and 
variations, too — of a feather less or more 
— does she pass through myriad forms 
from a most grotesque dodo to the dainty 
bird-of-paradise ! 

Looking beyond the first-hand works 
of Nature, there is also abundant evidence 
of her tutorship in the name by which 
man distinguishes her creations. Was 

58 



Difference 'Twixt Word and Word 

there not, from the very soul of a beauti- 
ful bird or blossom, a mysterious ema- 
nation that first suggested to man a name 
consonant with its beauty? The more 
obvious instances of this onomatopoeia 
even a child may detect; but the same 
influence, by a more esoteric process, has 
also determined the names of objects 
whose qualities are more complex and 
elusive. Witness : laurel, linden, lilac, and 
willow — names which contain syllabic hints 
of the grace and beauty of the trees they 
designate. 

So daffodil, lily, and daisy, clover, myrtle, 
and edelweiss as surely were christened 
at Nature's suggestion by some one whose 
ear was fine enough to catch — and whose 
mind was fine enough to duplicate ver- 
bally — the inaudible echoes which these 
blossoms made in his own soul. Not less 
aptly do the words cabbage, pumpkin, 
potato, and turnip measure the cruder 

59 



Why Love Grows Cold 

qualities resident in those homely vege- 
tables; while celery and asparagus as 
plainly mark a transition to a less stolid 
plane of vegetation. 

What a world of material, too, for stud- 
ies in verbal psychology might be culled 
from the names which authors have coined 
or appropriated for their characters. Ariel 
and Caliban cannot change names, neither 
can Hamlet and Jack FalstafF. Equally 
impossible would it be to think of Miran- 
da, Cordelia, Imogene, or Ophelia bearing 
the name of Goneril. Not less fine-eared 
than Shakespere, in her genius for chris- 
tening according to character, was George 
Eliot. When the arrival of Aunt Glegg 
and Aunt Pullet is announced, are we 
not already prepared for the worst, even 
as Hetty Sorrel's name forewarns us of 
petulant pettiness and Adam Bede's of 
physical and moral strength? How per- 
fectly, too, does the harsh and austere 

60 



Difference 'Twixt Word and Word 

resonance of Casaubon fit the man whose 
family quarterings were "three cuttle- 
fish sable, and a commentator ramp- 
ant." 

If we compare the every-day words that 
are being coined now — the dry-jointed ones 
of science, or the flippant ones of slan- 
guage — with those of ancient and assured 
position, lexicographically, we shall be 
forced to admit that it was most fortunate 
that the naming of things did not devolve 
upon a generation whose ears have been 
dulled by the brazen gongs of materialism. 
Undoubtedly, there are a few men and 
women now living who might rechristen 
the contents of the universe with many 
apt and poetic effects. Yet, notwithstand- 
ing our optimistic faith in these fine- 
eared few, were we threatened with the 
total obliteration of all the names now 
preserved in memory or print, most of 
us would grasp our dictionaries with an 

6i 



Why Love Grows Cold 

access of fervor that would send a new 
thrill through their old, unhonored 
covers. 

If, for inordinate sins of acquisitiveness, 
we should be divested some day of our 
wisdom, and bereft of any language, there 
might still be a hope that we could re- 
gain our lost paradises, if by chance there 
should be any Indian or savage tribes 
then extant. These, living closer to Na- 
ture, have always caught with finer ear 
"the rhymes of the universe," and the 
effete nations of the earth might safely 
delegate to them the naming of every- 
thing. A copy of any geographical dic- 
tionary of our continent would be all the 
certificate of competence which any Indian 
would need to elect him to the office of 
second Adam to an unnamed creation. 
Contrast, in the columns here given, the 
Indian's poetic delicacy of interpretation 
with the sordid renderings given by the 

62 



Difference 'Twixt Word and Word 



shrewd successors who despoiled him of 
his estates: 



Minnehaha 

Wilawana 

Owatana 

Winnebago 

Minnedosa 

Kinistino 

Winona 

Susquehanna 

Massawippi 

T6miscouata 

Juanita 



Joggins' Mines 

Gull Cove 

Bogart 

Dudswell Center 

Tupperville 

Digby 

Flesherton Station 

Stubbs' Bay 

Scott's Junction 

Hants 

Jimps 



Very interesting resemblances to the 
poetry of Indian names are found in the 
words and figures of young children who 
have not yet felt the weight of custom 
lie heavy upon them. "The starlight is 
the little sister of the moonlight, isn't 
it?" was the poetic query of a boy of five. 
The same child, seeing for the first time 
a field of white daisies, exclaimed, "Oh! 

63 



Why Love Grows Cold 

papa, the daisies are the cream of the 
grass, aren't they?" 

In nearly all children this instinct for 
finding apt and poetic imagery for things 
seen and felt is keener and finer than in 
the average adult, who gradually falls into 
the habit of using only the well-worn words 
and expressions employed by those whose 
fancy-windows have been boarded up by 
the stern matter-of-factness of life. 

Happily for literature, there are those 
in whom wonder keeps alive the natural 
instinct for using fresh imagery. In the 
poet, pre-eminently, and in many unknown 
to the world as such, the gift and power 
of the child's fresh vision remain, and wax 
instead of waning with maturity. When 
Pericles said the year had "lost its 
Spring," speaking of certain young men 
who had fallen in battle, he apprehended 
a sadly old occurrence with the fresh per- 
ceptions of a poet. 

64 



Difference 'Twixt Word and Word 

In all such seeing and recording, the idea 
and its form of expression are as organic- 
ally knit together as the tissue of a maple 
leaf or a pansy petal. Take away the form 
and color of the leaf, or of the idea, and 
either is destroyed. And is this not one 
of the closest tests of poetry and the 
genius back of it? For in every poetic 
thought the idea is so appareled that it 
is impossible to clothe it in any other form 
without destroying the idea itself. It is 
more accurate to speak of such thoughts 
as being embodied, as the lily is an em- 
bodiment of a beautiful thought, than to 
speak of their form as a thing apart from 
themselves. 

On the other hand, the raiment of the 
prose idea has no such vital connection 
with its wearer. As a rule, there is an 
indefinite number of rhetorical vestments, 
all well worn, that are equally becoming 
or unbecoming to its bony self. But let 
5 65 



Why Love Grows Cold 

some reader try any other drapery than 
the one it wears on this fancy of Mrs. 
Wharton's: "Her graces were comple- 
mentary, and it needed the mate's call 
to reveal the flash of color beneath her 
neutral-tinted wings." Again, who would 
venture to give a new verbal incarnation 
to either of these ideas : " Man, thou 
pendulum betwixt a smile and tear," or 

"By the blue rushing of the arrowy Rhone"? 

When we come upon thoughts so fitly 
embodied as these, wonder cannot help 
asking if there is not some fine, invisible 
force, like that which draws steel filings 
to a magnet, which draws to the poetic 
mind the apt word or figure which fits 
its fancy? How else, in a universe brim- 
ming with suggestions for millions and 
millions of figures, does a groping thought 
discover its proper verbal incarnation? 

For those who take part in the still 
creations of the thought-world, there will 

66 



Difference 'Twixt Word and Word 

always be a mysterious fascination in the 
endless rhetorical possibilities that wait 
hundreds and thousands of years for the 
new-born idea to which they belong. 
Among these possibilities, hidden in the in- 
visible regions of the universe, the thinker 
will go on mining, forever, for the treas- 
ures whose very intangibility makes them 
allure. 



67 



NATURE'S GAMES OF HIDE-AND- 
SEEK. 

The Trappist monk who takes the vow 
of silence is a true disciple of Nature, 
whose object-lessons are given in the 
silent academy of the green world and 
the starry chapels of the sky. 

Coming into this noiseless academy of 
Nature, man finds challenging him a mil- 
lion problems marvelously dovetailed to 
fit his mental capacities — problems in- 
volving millions of questions. But behind 
them all sits Nature, a warning finger 
ever on her lips, to remind man of her 
vow of silence. 

On the simpler schedule of her required 
course, man finds such life-problems as, 
"How will you keep from freezing and 
starving?" But though her poor human 

68 



Nature's Games of Hide-and-Seek 

children shiver and starve while trying 
to answer her conundrums, Nature is un- 
moved and will furnish no Bohn for her 
difficult passages. In her later elective 
courses, involving the problems of the 
sciences and arts. Nature is even less com- 
municative, making generation after gen- 
eration work on the same old problems, 
incidentally illustrating her own profun- 
dity and inculcating the virtues of patience 
and persistence. Indeed, if the Sphinx- 
like Mistress of the Great Open should 
break her vow of silence, one might expect 
her to whisper, "Festina lente, little folk; 
millions of years have been spent in pack- 
ing the heavens and earth with problems 
for man. Do you think we shall let you 
guess them all in a day, or a few short 
centuries? Though the edict has gone 
forth that everything shall be put under 
your feet, the date of the fulfillment of 
that prophecy is aeons off. Meantime, 

69 



Why Love Grows Cold 

the game of hide-and-seek goes merrily 
on, and is very entertaining to the Um- 
pire. 

"You humans get so very 'warm' some- 
times, as your children say in their lesser 
games of hide-and-seek. You have your 
fingers almost on a prodigious secret, 
and then, for some unaccountable reason, 
you get cold again and fail to find it. 
It is this element of unaccountability in 
your finite moves that makes the game 
of hide-and-seek between myself and man 
so entertaining. Several of your so-called 
scientists and inventors have been very 
'warm' in their search for the secret of 
aerial navigation, whose principles have 
been given in the object-lessons furnished 
by flying birds. And several Arctic ex- 
plorers have been very 'warm' — though 
not warm enough to keep them from 
freezing — in their game of Polar hide-and- 
seek. 

70 



Nature*s Games of Hide-and-Seek 



<( 



It is exceedingly interesting to me," 
one fancies Lady Nature continuing, "to 
see how many generations can behold 
an open secret without perceiving its 
significance. Think of the thousands be- 
fore Watts, who had seen a tea-kettle 
dance with steam for a partner, who never 
caught a hint of the mighty secret that 
was jauntily flaunting itself in their faces. 

"There have been other occasions when 
I have feared that you mortals would 
discover, prematurely, secrets which be- 
longed to a generation of riper wisdom 
and understanding. The discovery of gun- 
powder and dynamite would have been 
prevented till all men were peacefully in- 
clined, if I could have had my way. But 
I cannot let mankind have his way and 
have my own at the same time, so it 
sometimes happens that man outwits me, 
though he is always obliged to pay the 
fiddler in the end." 

71 



Why Love Grows Cold 

It is, perchance, presumptuous to put 
words in the mouth of La belle Dame 
Silencieuse, Nevertheless, it is natural 
to wonder if she has any exact rules in 
her cosmic game of hide-and-seek. Does 
she "time" the players in her game, allow- 
ing a score of years for the discovery of 
one secret and double that number for 
another? In other words, has she fixed 
dates for disclosing her secrets, and picked 
players to whom she occultly signals, 
"You are ^warm,' stop there"; or, does 
she allow a certain amount of fortuity of 
time and personality to enter into the 
conditions of the game ? Does she deliber- 
ately give such a mental and soular twist 
to one man's thinking that he is in- 
stinctively and irresistibly lured by the 
sublime game of hide-and-seek among the 
stars, which ends in astronomical dis- 
coveries, and does she in another man in- 
vert this twist, so that he must, perforce, 

72 



Nature's Games of Hide-and-Seek 

go digging in the earth, finding his game 
of hide-and-seek in dark subterranean re- 
gions, where the shorthand records of pre- 
historic races are hidden away? 

On the face of Nature, herself, one may- 
read no sign as she stoHdly umpires the 
games of the universe. But who can 
doubt that, back of her seeming indiffer- 
ence, there was for the Maker of the Great 
Playground a delight in hiding for man 
treasures in the innermost parts of the 
earth, the ocean deeps, and inaccessible 
realms of upper air; a delight not un- 
related to the happiness which human 
parents feel when they hide their Christ- 
mas presents in the very toes of their 
children's stockings, or delay the discovery 
of their choicest gifts by folds upon folds 
of wrapping-paper. Nor is it merely fanci- 
ful to surmise that the jubilations of the 
grown-up children, who discover the larger 
gifts in the hiding-places of earth, sea, and 

73 



Why Love Grows Cold 

air, are a source of pleasure to the Giver 
who hid for their finding. 

For what other ends, too, save to dehght 
the eyes of the grown-up children of men, 
were fitted up and stored away with such 
mysterious cunning the weird caves and 
grottoes in the wild fastnesses of the earth, 
where for long centuries they were being 
decorated with stalactites, strange-colored 
lakes and rivers, like the enchanted lands 
of fairy-tales? 

To each generation it is given to dis- 
cover a few of the things that Nature 
has hidden in her great playground; but 
there are millions of other surprises which 
are kept for generations yet to be — finer 
secrets for finer senses. The grandparents 
learn to sail the ocean, but for the great- 
great-great-grandchildren is set the harder 
problem and greater glory of cloudward 
flight in the bird-winged spaces of the 
sky. 

74 



Nature's Games of Hide-and-Seek 

"See if you can find it, and what will 
you do with it when you have found it ?" 
are the two great lures of Nature's game. 

"Find my coal-beds, my oil-wells, my 
copper, gold, and silver veins, my marble 
and granite beds; the goodly grains of 
oak and ash trees; my diamonds, opals, 
and rubies. 

"Now that you have found it, my little 
children, what will you do with that hard 
shining stuff which you call coal? Will 
you cook it or build walls with it ? Aha ! 
I see; you think you will try to burn it. 
I'll own you are getting warm, or will 
be soon; still, you are not yet 'out of the 
woods,' as you say. Touch a match to 
it; it does not ignite so readily as you 
could wish. Never mind, keep on trying. 
I see you will. There ! you have caught 
the idea at last. Bright little creatures, 
these men ! 

"Found my marbles and granite, too? 

75 



Why Love Grows Cold 

Well, what will you do with them? Be- 
fore you hack them up too much, only 
notice the fine colors and veinings in these 
stones. 'Twould be a pity to put them 
where their beauty would not be seen 
and admired. Ah ! I feel your mind grop- 
ing toward temple and cathedral de- 
signs. ^If it were only more regular in 
shape,' I hear you say. Fie! you can 
easily overcome that difficulty, my fine 
boys. But look ! there is one among you 
who sees other things in this marble of 
mine. You call him a dreamy man, but 
by and by you will call him a genius and 
a sculptor, for he will make his dreams 
come true in marble; and the beautiful 
forms which he carves will delight the 
Creator of the marble, as they delight 
the sculptor and his fellow-men who see 
them. 

" Still another man, standing near your 
quarries, has found a strangely different 

76 



Nature's Games of Hide-and-Seek 

use for these massive stones. He thinks 
the dead will be honored and the living 
gratified by rearing what you will call 
monuments and headstones over those 
who sleep under my green coverlids. Other 
spectators are doubtful about this, and, 
turning to me, cry : *Tell me, Mother Na- 
ture, were monuments and headstones 
also predestined ideas, wrapped in the 
marble and granite, or are they but hu- 
man vagaries? 

" ' Tell us, also,' exclaim other wondering 
ones, 'whether the beautiful grains of 
oak and sycamore were wrought for the 
ends to which man puts them, or are 
they simply the more happy forms of lu- 
sus natures f^ 

"'Confide, also, to me,' whispers the 
dreaming lover, as he slips a jeweled ring 
upon a finger of his sweetheart's hand, 
* whether my use of the diamond and opal 
was foreseen when the still years wrought 

77 



Why Love Grows Cold 

rainbow tints — in the dark elements of 
the earth.' " 

And yet no audible answer comes from 
La Bella Donna Natura. Still she goes on 
playing her game of hide-and-seek, not 
only with gold, silver, precious stones, 
pearls, corals, sea-ferns, buried footprints, 
fossils, and stars, but with the most com- 
mon gifts of every-day life, down to the 
last morsel which man eats or the home- 
liest button on his coat. Between the field 
of waving wheat and the slice of bread 
which he eats she ranges door after door, 
double-bolted and barred, and sets him a 
score of riddles between the coquetting 
blossoms of the cotton plant and the 
dainty-patterned muslin into which they 
transmigrate. 

How slight, too, is the cue which she 
gives in colorless sap of the sweet and 
solid commodity known to the world as 
maple sugar. In other instances she not 

78 



Nature's Games of Hide-and-Seek 

only gives no cue, but incases her gift in 
such a forbidding exterior that her con- 
fidence in man's abiHty to discover its 
proper use is one of the subtlest com- 
pliments paid to the human race. The 
oyster, in or out of its shell, the clam, 
and the unprepossessing lobster are ex- 
amples in point. Even the common yel- 
low pumpkin was once a noncommittal 
sphinx, bearing on its amiable, shiny 
jowls no hint of the latent pies which it 
contained. Sitting vis-a-vis to this popu- 
lar pie, whose raison-d' etre seems so uni- 
versally established, one must still harbor 
a vestige of wonder whether it was the 
final evolution foreordained for the pump- 
kin, or whether the pie idea was de ad- 
ventitia and as wholly foreign to its 
original design and purpose as the bur- 
lesque, Jack O' Lantern destiny thrust 
upon it by the small boy. 
Similar queries emerge from the blue 

79 



Why Love Grows Cold 

wreaths of smoke which halo the heads 
of the devotees of Lady Nicotine. The 
devotees themselves would answer with 
one accord that the obvious censer for the 
easeful weed was the golden bowl of the 
Meerschaum, or its baser clay substitute 
among the common brotherhood of pipes. 
And yet, despite the clouds of secular in- 
cense daily and hourly ascending from the 
pipes of men, there are those who are 
agnostic on this point, as they are con- 
cerning the mysterious evolutions over 
which a modern chef presides. 

For the beasts of the field no such que- 
ries are possible. When the horse eats 
grass or oats, there is no loop-hole 
through which fancy may peep to spy a 
doubt whether the horse's use of grass 
is in accordance with its original purpose, 
and the same is true of everything on the 
menu of wild beasts. " Even when man is 
one of the items ?^' interposes the Grizzly. 

80 



Nature's Games of Hide-and-Seek 

Ah ! Monsieur Bruin, you simply furnish 
another illustration of the main conten- 
tion of this paper, that everything in 
this world has an unanswered riddle at- 
tached. Your own skin is a case in point. 
Was it designed solely and expressly to 
keep you warm, or was there a prevision 
of a secondary end which took account 
of man's needs also? Were the seal, otter, 
mink, and sable made warm and beauti- 
ful for those animals alone, or were the 
shivers of men and women, as well as 
their esthetic desires, considered, when 
the ill-visaged seal was robed in a fur that 
the haughtiest lady of the land is proud 
to wear ? Moreover, if man lawfully holds 
a mortgage on the skins of all fur-bear- 
ing animals, and upon some of the feath- 
ers of birddom, what are the rules which 
decide the legal date of foreclosure? 

Though these queries may belong to 
serious moral problems. Nature tran- 
6 8i 



Why Love Grows; Cold 

quilly includes them all in her guessing 
games. Kindred riddles lie in the method 
— which in man would seem criminal — by 
which Nature allows man to find out for 
himself, perhaps at the cost of many 
lives, the difference between her edible 
and poisonous plants. How naughty, 
too, looks her nonchalance which permits 
the human race to suffer for centuries 
from a thousand diseases when she has 
thousands of storehouses full of healing 
herbs and mineral waters ! But the rules 
of her guessing game are dearer to Na- 
ture than aught else. "True," she says, 
"I have innumerable herbs and minerals 
for your innumerable diseases; but which 
herb and which mineral is good for each 
disease is for you to discover. The dis- 
covery may be attended with a few fatal- 
ities, but, after all, does it not provide 
you with a magnificent series of pretty 
problems in what you call the 'calcu- 

82 



Nature's Games of Hide-and-Seek 

lation of chances'? For even when you 
have hit upon the right remedy for some 
particular disease, there is still a large 
field for experiment in determining the 
proper amount for a dose; a small one 
may cure and a large one may kill you. 
But do not all these risks and chances 
add relish and zest to your search? The 
game's the thing. Bless your hearts," 
concludes that amiable dame, "only con- 
sider the pains I take to invent games 
for you. Have I not even gone so far 
as to bury whole cities, their inhabitants 
and all their wonderful works of art with 
them, to make a superb game of hide- 
and-seek for later generations?" 

Nor does Nature end her games in the 
material world of man. Every truth, sci- 
entific or moral, which man has discov- 
ered, he has found hidden in swathings 
of error, or rather mixed with a disguis- 
ing composite from which he slowly learns 

33 



Why Love Grows Cold 

to fuse away the slag, as he extracts the 
dross from the material in which the pre- 
cious metals are embedded. 

Another of the chief rules of the hide-and- 
seek game seems to be : The choicer the 
gift, the more craftily should it be con- 
cealed. This rule is so dear to Nature 
that she never departs from it in any 
of her bo-peep games, whether she plays 
with birds, flowers, precious stones, or 
the higher gifts in the world of thought 
and feeling. For the chattering sparrow 
and garrulous marten, that gossip to 
every chance-comer, there are no coverts 
prepared; but the nightingale is hedged 
about with woody privacies and special 
seasons and must be sought by those 
for whose finer ears its finer notes were 
conceived. Likewise the counterfeit gold 
of the dandelion and buttercup is flung 
broadcast upon every field and meadow, 
but the fragrant petals of the trailing 

84 



Nature's Games of Hide-and-Seek 

arbutus are hidden under the dead, brown 
leaves that cover the lower mountain 
slopes, where the flower-lover goes to woo 
it on his knees. 

Not even when Nature is playing her 
greatest game, which is said to make 
the world go round, does she depart from 
her favorite rule. For does she not hide 
away, among several hopeless millions 
of irrelevant beings, the one only woman 
who is worth the search of the one only 
man foreordained for her? 

On many other vexed problems that 
most nearly concern his public and private 
welfare, man must still play a game of 
hide-and-seek. 

"Is monarchy or a republican form of 
government better?" asks man. 

"Try both, and find out for yourself," 
answers the silence. 

"Which is right, monogamy or polyg- 
amy?" 

85 



Why Love Grows Cold 

" Burn your fingers and you will know," 
is the silent response. 

"Is the soul immortal?" cries man, and 
the same implacable silence answers, " You 
have only to die to find that out." 

Something of the same principle of se- 
crecy is discernible in Nature's personal 
bequests to the mind and heart of man. 
It is a wise man who has discovered 
the real quality and potentiality of his 
mental and moral ore in the disguising 
substance with which it is mixed. So it 
frequently happens that a man for a long 
time may work only his zinc and copper 
mines, modestly unconscious of the pos- 
session of gold and silver veins. 

"Unknown to Cromwell as to me 
Was Cromwell's measure or degree." 

Among the best known authors of the 
day there are several who for many years 
occupied themselves with agricultural pur- 
suits on land rich in gold and silver veins 

86 



Nature's Games of Hide-and-Seek 

of pathos and humor. On the other hand, 
many have persisted in carrying on min- 
ing operations in a region plainly adapted 
to nothing but the cultivation of farm 
produce. 

As another result of Nature's system 
which provides a man with no well-mapped 
Baedeker of the territory of his own soul, 
it often comes to pass that a man and 
his nearest neighbor may be violently 
projected into space by an explosion of 
an unsuspected temperamental mine, or 
covered with burning lava from a vol- 
cano of whose existence the owner was 
unaware. 

Nevertheless, whatever mishaps may be 
due to the bo-peep rules of Nature's game, 
one must conclude that more serious 
calamities would follow were she less ret- 
icent in her intercourse with mortals. 
What interest, indeed, or stimulus to 
endeavor or mere existence would be left 

87 



Why Love Grows Cold 

in the world, were all Nature's secrets 
suddenly divulged? And what pulseless 
monotony would ensue could a man make 
no further voyages of discovery into the 
now comparatively dark and unsurveyed 
hemispheres of self? 

To guard against the chance of such 
monotony, even for her infinitely varied 
ego, does not Nature also play games 
with herself— a kind of gambling solitaire — 
almost surprising her wonder-filled soul 
with apparently capricious marvels of 
beauty? When first the gray and brown 
skeleton trees, rustic fences, and rude huts 
were robed in the night-time with fairy 
white draperies woven by the silent shut- 
tles of Cloud-land, was the white enchant- 
ment foreseen by Nature, or was it an 
accidental enhancement of her beauty, 
like the down-falling tresses of a maiden, 
whose dancing has loosened the coils of 
her hair? 

88 



Nature's Games of Hide-and-Seek 

A similar interrogation floats down in 
the individual snowflake, falling one day 
in loose irregularity of shape, and the 
next in simple and complex star-forms 
of exquisite symmetry and kaleidoscopic 
diversity. 

The scientist may try to hive our fancies 
by telling us that under certain atmos- 
pheric conditions the snowflake is bound 
to blossom into a perfect star, as the 
window-pane under other conditions will 
be utilized as a panel for the delicate star 
and frost designs frescoed upon it by 
the King of the Frost School. But the 
laws which control the flowering of the 
snowflake or its sister frost-star upon 
the window-pane seem to be subject to the 
frolicsome variations of an impromptu 
fancy, entirely difl'erent from the fixed laws 
which control the blossoming of the daisy 
or buttercup. 

In the graceful vagaries of the frost- 

89 



Why Love Grows Cold 

star Nature seems to say, "Not all of 
my laws shall be decreed to yield un- 
varying results, lest they weary mankind 
and me." 

Hence, some of her games of solitaire, 
as well as those she plays with man, are 
apparently played with dice — her storm- 
games, her colored picture-games of cloud- 
and shadow-land, the everchanging leaf- 
tints of autumn, the spots and markings 
in the fur of animals, and even the new 
combinations of form, feature, and mind 
in the human race. 

In his inherited liking for games of 
chance man discovers tokens of his filial 
kinship to Nature. Like his dice-tossing 
mother, he, too, has games in which fixed 
laws determine the issues of his moves, 
and other games which he plays with the 
tricksy daughters of Chance, who lead 
him one day over flowery meads, and the 
next into a merciless maelstrom. Then, 

90 



Nature's Games of Hide-and-Seek 

as the swirling waters suck him in, Nature 
gurgles recklessly, "There goes another 
of my pawns ! " For however independently 
man may think he plays his games, sooner 
or later Nature manages to become one 
of the players, making of man and his 
game a new game for herself. 

Even when he plays his last losing game. 
Nature picks up his fallen cue and over 
his lifeless body raffles with earth, water, 
or fire, in a new and silent game of Trans- 
mutation, while eternity holds the stakes. 



91 



THE SALT LAKE OF LITERATURE. 

"There, there; don't feel so bad. It 
isn't really poison, but black coffee the 
heroine is drinking, and the blood which 
follows the hero's suicidal dagger is made 
of harmless dye." Such were the com- 
forting words whispered by her escort 
in the ear of a weeping matin^e-goer. 
But still the sympathetic shower continued, 
for it was a very piteous scene, and all 
over the theater handkerchiefs and mas- 
culine comforters were doing their best 
to restore a dry season. Ivyl Kerioth, 
dramatic critic and single gentleman, with 
facial muscles well in control, scanned his 
fellow-weepers, and, following the lead of 
his whimsical fancy, roughly estimated 
that the total volume of tears shed over 
the tragedy he was witnessing, openly 

92 



The Salt Lake of Literature 

and covertly, by masculine and feminine 
weepers, would easily fill a quart bottle. 
With this result as a unit of measure, 
he amused himself by carrying his com- 
putation still further. He made a men- 
tal list of all the tragedies that were being 
played in all the theaters of that city, 
and finally of all the theaters of other 
cities, in his own country, and all over 
the world. 

At this point in his calculations Mr. 
Kerioth was obliged to pause from sheer 
inability to deal with such large num- 
bers, for he had brought his lachrymal 
computations to several thousand gallons, 
which he was attempting to reduce to 
hogsheads, when the curtain rose and left 
his problem unfinished. 

After emerging from the theater, how- 
ever, his mind again reverted to the prob- 
lem, which became still more complicated 
when he attempted to include an estimate 

93 



Why Love Grows Cold 

of all the tears which readers had shed 
from the time of the first pathetic book 
published, down to our own saline liter- 
ary era. But his numbers had reached 
such mammoth proportions that he de- 
cided to leave the realm of pure mathe- 
matics. 

"I will avail myself of metaphorical 
license," said Mr. Kerioth, "and reduce 
my result to terms of lake." After several 
trial processes, Mr. Kerioth felt satisfied 
with the approximate accuracy of the 
following result : " The tears shed by all 
the theater-goers in all the theaters of 
all the cities of all the world, in all ages, 
past and present, plus the sum of all the 
tears shed by the readers of all the pa- 
thetic literature ever published, would make 
a lake whose dimensions would nearly 
equal those of Salt Lake, Utah." This 
diffused and hitherto unrecognized body 
of water, to which your eye and mine, 

94 



The Salt Lake of Literature 

my tender-hearted reader, have furnished 
many a tributary, Mr. Kerioth christened 
the Salt Lake of Literature. 

Whether Mr. Kerioth' s estimate was 
exaggerated or not is far from our pur- 
pose to prove. To quibble about a few 
barrels of tears more or less would show 
but a petty understanding of the spirit of 
Mr. Kerioth' s investigations. The question 
for him and us is whether it is not time to 
ask if there is to be no limit to the amount 
of fictitious misery which may be added 
to a world already so full, from castle 
to cabin, of real tragedies? Shall we sit 
by, in acquiescence, while literature is 
turned into a great Bridge of Sighs, over 
which our reluctant souls must travel to 
discover the particular cemetery in which 
our novelists have laid their dead? 

The Bible, scientists, and our own expe- 
rience tell us that mirth and joy raise the 
tide of vitality, thereby improving the 

95 



Why Love Grows Cold 

health, disposition, and character; while 
sadness and grief, whether from real or 
fictitious causes, lower the vital tide, de- 
press the spirits, and in a hundred ways 
make for unrighteousness. 

By the time we reach maturity, most 
of us or our friends have taken part in 
some real tragedy. Every year, too, under 
all the superficial sheen of the world's 
brightness, the Weltschmerz throbs more 
heavily in our ears. Yet it seems that 
all this pain does not suffice us, and we 
must, forsooth, have another world of 
imaginary woes, duplicating and tripli- 
cating all the villains and villainies, pains, 
heartaches, desertions, disasters, and 
deaths that suspend their phantom swords 
above us in real life. It should be remem- 
bered, moreover, that the gratuitous griefs 
of this second literary world are invested 
with a perennial character. In the world 
of the quick, the mute and inglorious 

96 



The Salt Lake of Literature 

take the various substitutes of hemlock 
and halter and pass on, seldom leaving 
more than one generation of mourners 
behind them. But the suicide in liter- 
ature is not so; for generation after gen- 
eration, in all ages and climes, weeps over 
his bier. For three centuries thousands 
and thousands have sighed and wept over 
Hamlet, King Lear, and Othello, and the 
same lachrymal impost will undoubtedly 
continue to be levied so long as the world 
and printing-presses endure. When one 
considers that all sympathy is an expendi- 
ture of force, is it not in point to ask 
whether so great an outlay of sympathy 
over histrionic and literary grief does not 
divert from its more legitimate channels 
the compassion which should find an out- 
let in efforts to relieve the genuine miser- 
ies of the world? 

At this point several interlinear protests 
may be made by the scholar who believes 
7 97 



Why Love Grows Cold 

in the theory of the Aristotelian Ka- 
tharsis, and the highly beneficial results of 
a spiritual harrowing, such as was effected 
by the old Greek tragedies. In the acety- 
lene light of the twentieth century, how- 
ever, one must discard many arguments 
that were valid enough for xyz B. C, 
when the world was still too young to 
have suffered much, and before authors, 
printing-presses, and sin had raised the 
tear tax to its present exorbitant rate, 

Let one make but a random enumer- 
ation of the most popular books of the 
last few years, and before the mind's 
eye comes a long and mournful procession 
of Blighted Beings, the very mention of 
whose names is a signal for pectoral heav- 
ings : Evadne, Diavolo, The Tenor, Lit- 
tle Billee, Trilby, The Disagreeable Man, 
Little Brick, Flavia, Rudolph, Weelum 
MacLure, Jamie Soutar, Reverend and 
Mrs. Theron Ware, Georgiana, John Gray, 

98 



The Salt Lake of Literature 

Jessica, Petronius, Eunice, John Storm, 
Gloria Quayle, The Gad-Fly, Hugh Scar- 
lett, Tommy and Grizel, Allegra and 
Raphael Dominick, Cyrano de Bergerac 
and Quisante. 

And so, with additions from older novel- 
ists and those yet to come, one might 
stretch the line out to the crack of doom, 
drawing large enrollments of sorrowful 
ones from the works of George Eliot, 
Thackeray, Dickens, Scott, Hardy, Hall 
Caine, Hawthorne, Mrs. Stowe, and our 
generally cheerful Howells, not to mention 
possible legions of sad-eyed recruits from 
Russian, Norwegian, French, German, and 
Italian fiction. Nor may our forcM sus- 
pirations cease when we lay down the 
novel. Between the sighs expended over 
the last tragic romance read, and the next 
one that comes our way, we perchance 
think to soothe ourselves with the lighter 
fancies of a summer magazine. But alas ! 

LofC. 99 



Why Love Grows Cold 

over all is the trail of the tear. Even 
the short story of the magazine would 
admirably serve the purpose of the proph- 
et Jeremiah, who wished that his eyes 
might be " a fountain of tears." 

Worst of all, no reasonable remonstrance 
can be made against anything so fine 
as some of the pathos found in the short 
magazine story, and the same difficulty 
is encountered when one tries to make 
any but general objections to the harrow- 
ing masterpieces of literature. In most 
cases the reader, in spite of the mellow 
emendations made by his heart, reluctantly 
agrees with the author that his tragedy 
had to end as it did, as inevitably as the 
final explosion must follow the lighting 
of the end of the fuse. 

Yet, our plaint may not end here. 
If we are damp with sympathy in the 
humid atmosphere of prose fiction, how 
drenched is our condition as we walk the 

lOO 



The Salt Lake of Literature 

tear-dewed fields of poesy, where not only 
men and women add their bass and treble 
to the literary dirge, but the glad and 
peaceful flowers and birds are coerced to 
furnish material for pathetic fallacy. The 
rose glows bright with its own beautiful 
blushes, but along comes the poet, and, 
plucking its petals, leaves the thorn be- 
hind — in his stanzas — for us. Anon, an- 
other poet finds the aster, joyous purple 
with the last wine of summer, and pro- 
ceeds to make a poignant composite of 
his own biography and the flower's, in 
this wise : 



"As Apollo wrote, while his woe flowed faster, 
His sad ' ai, ai' on the hyacinth leaf, 
So for dead summer, O mourning aster, 
Thy purple is pale as with silent grief 
Love no more and yet love remembered, 
Is the tale which thou and they can tell 
WTio sigh over life's last fire low-embered, 
O love's lost summer, for aye farewell ! 

"O golden-eyed, sky-purpled flower, 
In the silent sunlight born to shine! 
A fellow-heir to an equal dower. 
Our lots are the same, both thine and mine! 

lOI 



Why Love Grows Cold 

To come on earth a short-lived comer, 
Between a morning and evening bell, 
To wake between winter and waning summer, 
To see the world and to say farewell." 

Even the wee, cheerful, bright-eyed 
mousie, living in unconscious tune with 
the universe, the poet waylays and apos- 
trophizes until he has wrung from his 
timorous breast another text of woe. 

"The best-laid schemes of mice and men gang 
aft agley," 

and 

"Oh, I backward cast my e'e 
On prospects drear, 
And forward, though I cannot see, 
I guess and fear," 

which the mouse, a better philosopher, 
never does. 

Admitting, as we must, that the sweet- 
est songs have told of saddest thought, 
we must also admit that poets do some- 
times get into ruts; or, to speak in more 
veiled language, they develop a morbid 
fondness for rowing Melpomene's bark — 

I02 



The Salt Lake of Literature 

with Alas ! and Ah me ! for poetical pad- 
dles — on a Dead Sea of bitter recollections 
and gloomy forebodings. When one finds 
a poet who persists in the continual use 
of rhythmical crepe, one cannot help sus- 
pecting that there is back of his habit 
the same cause which makes a pretty 
widow cling to her weeds many years 
after they have ceased to be a symbol 
of grief. Both the poet and the widow 
think the crepe is becoming, and so they 
continue to use it, the one in her dress 
and the other in his diction. 

And the sighs of admiration and sym- 
pathy elicited by it, are they not sweet? 

But one should not fail to acknowledge 
in latter-day poetry many improvements 
over the ancient manner of wailing. The 
modern poet dresses the skeleton at his 
feast in clothes that do not reveal his 
grim contours so clearly as they were 
exposed in the elder days of art, as one 

103 



Why Love Grows Cold 

may ascertain for himself by comparing 
some of the grisly ballads of olden times 
with the minstrelsy of the last half-cen- 
tury. A similar evolution of expression 
is evident in parallel readings from the 
good old hymn-books and those now 
in use. Reading the former, it is easy 
to understand why groans were so impor- 
tant a feature of primeval religion. Where 
we sing, " Lead, Kindly Light," our quak- 
ing ancestors sang : 



" Stop, poor sinner, stop and think 
Before you farther go. 
Can you sport upon the brink 
Of everlasting woe? 
Hell beneath is gaping wide, 
Vengeance waits the dread command, 
Soon to stop your sport and pride. 
And sink you with the damn'd. 

"Though your hearts be made of steel, 
Your forehead lined with brass, 
God at length will make you feel ; 
He will not let you pass. 
Sinners then in vain will call. 
Though they now despise his grace; 
Rocks and mountains on us fall 
And hide us from his face." 



104 



The Salt Lake of Literature 

With the gradual mellowing of theology 
has come a corresponding mellowing in the 
hymns of the church. Neither the clergy- 
man nor hymn- writer makes hell "gape" 
quite so wide as his predecessor did. In 
profane literature, the same elimination 
of the horrible, if not of the pathetic^ has 
been taking place. If Shakespere were to 
rewrite "King Lear" in our day, it is alto- 
gether possible that he would omit the 
superfluous ferocity of the scene in which 
the old King is deprived of his eyesight. 
We have accepted such scenes in the clas- 
sics, as we have some of the literary 
abominations of the Old Testament, till 
we are wonted to their hideousness; but 
that fact should no longer countenance 
the course of the author who creates a 
literary chamber of horrors as revolting 
and vulgar as its more realistic counter- 
part at the Eden Mus^e. 

A reasonable amount of woe and deso- 
105 



Why Love Grows Cold 

lation one is willing to concede to the 
author who takes his plots from hfe. 
Nevertheless, from his most faultlessly 
true art one is now and then prone to 
turn back for consolation to his child- 
hood books of fairy-tales, where, in a 
miniature heaven of the imagination, the 
wailing and gnashing of teeth are the ex- 
clusive role of the wicked, and virtue gets 
something more than its bleak and tradi- 
tional reward. 

Any conclusions with regard to the jus- 
tifiableness of the wholesale production 
of pathetic literature should not ignore 
the attitude of children toward the tale 
which does not furnish its heroes and 
heroines a happy issue out of all their 
afflictions. Most children will promptly 
veto the second telling of a story that 
does not bring forth its Shadrachs and 
Meshachs with every hair unsinged. One 
little boy I know insists upon a revised 

io6 



The Salt Lake of Literature 

sequel to all the sad stories which are 
told him. When his mother invents thrill- 
ing narratives of squirrels and chipmunks 
that cross dark, swollen rivers on chips 
and shingles, the quiver of little lips warns 
her that, though a dipping or two may 
be conceded, not a single furry mariner 
may be allowed to perish. 

It is doubtful whether children of a 
larger growth ever wholly outgrow the 
covert desire to have the tangled threads 
straightened out in the last chapter, hav- 
ing read enough in the pages of life of 
the crooked that can never be made 
straight. It is, indeed, for this very rea- 
son that feminine fingers so often turn 
the pages of a novel a Vhebreu, For, 
notwithstanding all she has seen, heard, 
and read, the average feminine reader, 
with faith distancing the mustard-seed, 
in the annulling and rectifying influences 
of matrimony, is secretly hoping to find 

107 



Why Love Grows Cold 

a nice, fat clergyman with a benign pro- 
nunciamento hovering over the last scene 
in the last chapter. 

We therefore entreat the gentle author, 
as much as in him lies, to keep this aver- 
age woman from chilling disappointments. 
Before he again uses that drop of ink 
which "makes a million think," let him ask 
himself whether it will also cause a mil- 
lion tears or a million smiles. 

If, however, it is his unavoidable des- 
tiny to be the creator of a hero exuding 
woe at every pore, let him strive to give 
his readers a little afterglow before the 
great final darkness, as Thackeray did 
in the closing vision of the Newcomes 
and Holmes in his tale of " The Little Gen- 
tleman," whose death was deliverance and 
whose last sacrament was the hallowed 
kiss of Iris. 

Or, should it be impossible for the au- 
thor of the sable-tipped quill to achieve 

io8 



The Salt Lake of Literature 

a literary sunset of this cast, let him 
assuage the sympathetic pains of his 
readers by applying homeopathic or 
allopathic principles, or both, in the 
denouement of his plot, after the manner 
of Hamlet. In this play one grief is the 
counter-irritant of another till the last 
scene, when the allopathic treatment 
of the King's death is introduced. With 
four different emotions in simultaneous 
contention, the local strain caused by the 
concentration of one emotion is obviously 
diminished, with the result that the four 
deaths are more supportable than Ham- 
let's alone would have been. 

Viewing the stark quartette in the last 
scene the reader finds his grief for Ham- 
let very well parried by a pagan glee at 
the taking-off of the King, as well as by 
the remembrance that Ophelia is no more ; 
while undue sentiment over the death of 
Laertes is checked by a vision of the en- 

109 



Why Love Grows Cold 

venomed rapier. Whether the death of 
a woman of such " slight elements" as the 
Queen could reach deep enough to pro- 
duce any emotion is a question upon 
which readers may differ. For the average 
mourner, it is probable that impious resig- 
nation is the most palpable emotion oc- 
casioned by "Gertrude's" decease. 

An unknown critic has discovered a fur- 
ther foreshadowing of relief in Hamlet's 
entreaty, " absent thee from felicity awhile." 
"Hamlet," says this critic, "did not wish 
Horatio to absent himself from felicity 
forever to tell his story, but only for 
^ awhile.^ " 

On the basis of this subtle conjecture, 
fancy may paint an afterglow of hope, 
even for the bereft Horatio. 



no 



ETHICAL BALANCES. 

"In men whom men condemn as ill 
I find so much of goodness still, 
In men whom men pronounce divine 
I find so much of sin and blot, 
I do not dare to draw a line 
Between the two, where God has not." 

—Joaquin Miller. 

Nature's rule of doing nothing by leaps 
finds no more interesting and perplexing 
illustration than in the imperceptible gra- 
dations of less and more by which she 
passes from a good man or woman to a 
bad one. So well-nigh endless is her line 
of variations and combinations before 
she makes a downright good or bad man 
that one feels that anything like an abso- 
lute standard of ethical measurement is 
impossible, and that even the adjectives 
good and ^<3:^— applied to men and women 
— should always be used with a suffixed 
plus or minus sign, to indicate relativity, 

III 



Why Love Grows Cold 

as well as the element of incalculability 
that is present in all moraHty. For ex- 
ample, Mr. Haycock is a good man minus, 
and Mr. Slumville is a bad man plus. 

Even were sins and sinners a fixed and 
constant quantity, another complication 
arises in the grade and ability of those 
who sit in judgment. Moreover, the point 
of view of the saintly sinner and the sin- 
ful saint who weigh the shortcomings 
of others is continually shifting with the 
changing perspective of years and experi- 
ence. The problem of moral judgments 
is further complicated by Nature's tena- 
cious application of the same rule of avoid- 
ing leaps in passing from purely moral — 
or heart — qualities to purely mental ones. 
A degree of stupidity, in its results, is 
often as disastrous as considerable willful 
perversity. "It is worse than a crime — 
it is a blunder," voices the feeling of many 
besides Talleyrand, who have been obliged 

112 



Ethical Balances 

to come in daily contact with stupidity. 
*^ Mit Dummheit kdmpfen die Gdtter selbst 
vergebens^'' expresses the despair which only 
obtuseness can arouse. 

A long line of qualities, to which the 
code of Sinai makes no allusion, have 
nearly as much frictional force in their 
presence, or absence, as the absence of 
the so-called cardinal virtues which the 
Ten Commandments were designed to pre- 
serve. Some experience with the painful 
or impersonable saint and the genial and 
fastidious sinner undoubtedly accounts 
for Emerson's frank confession: "I could 
better eat with one who did not respect 
the truth or the laws than with a sloven 
or an unpresentable person. Moral quali- 
ties rule the world, but at short distances 
the senses are despotic." 

The subtle difficulty in estimating the 
relative availability and durability of 
mental and moral qualities of different 
8 113 



Why Love Grows Cold 

men may be one of the causes which ac- 
count for the yes which is so often latent 
in the most truthful woman's no-, a, no 
that has done such faithful service as a 
theme for masculine wit and philosophy. 
But no man knoweth — or at least no man 
telleth — of his own mental zigzagging from 
yes to no along the route of indecision 
that finally lands him at the yea-and- 
nay junction of some woman's will. 

Whether consciously or unconsciously, 
nearly all this zigzagging is the result of 
an effort to balance qualities and charac- 
teristics whose moral specific gravity fluc- 
tuates under the different exigencies of life 
so that no exact ratio of measurement is 
obtainable. A combination of imagina- 
tion, common-sense, tact, and humor will 
sometimes look even a frowning Provi- 
dence out of countenance, when solemn 
and sluggish goodness — so called — could 
only look blank and numbly resigned. 

114 



Ethical Balances 

Thus by ethical assay one discovers that 
goodness and virtue are not simple ele- 
ments, but resolvable into an indefinite 
number of constituents, of which many 
are not associated with goodness at all; 
for every virtue has a double parentage — 
in the heart and head — and every so-called 
mental quality is sib to a virtue or vice. 
Fancy, whose birthplace even Shakespere 
could not determine, is so blithe and de- 
lectable a gift, and withal so effectual 
as a matrimonial tether, that its entire 
absence in a life-partner calls for heavy 
compensations of some sort. Likewise 
humor, its near kin, is so certain a pledge 
of sanity, good cheer, and comradeship 
that the man in whom it is wholly lacking 
is sure to give as much pain negatively, 
to one type of woman, as some other man 
may by a positive fault. 

Half of the luminous quips and fanta- 
sies which naturally suggest themselves to 

115 



Why Love Grows Cold 

Mr. Saltus Atticus he cannot communicate 
to his wife, because they would be lost. 
In her company he falls, perforce, into the 
habit of eliminating all but the more ob- 
vious of his musings, while all his lighter, 
finer fancies are still-born, leaving behind 
them only the dumb yearning that follows 
futile parturition. 

Mrs. De Profundis, also, learns in sad- 
ness that no pearl that she may bring 
up from her deepest divings will pass for 
more than a common pebble to the man 
whom — in an improvident hour — she took 
for richer or poorer. "He was a good 
man and brave," writes Professor Roberts 
of one of his heroes, " and a woman could 
trust him to do anything except to keep 
her from yawning." 

Instinct may sometimes feel, but Nature 
alone knows the true valuation of all the 
gifts that make up the mental and moral 
equipment of her children. Would she only 

ii6 



Ethical Balances 

now and then give us the key to the sys- 
tem by which she so accurately computes 
the quantivalents of brain and heart 
power ! Meanwhile, we can only guess at 
the figures in her table of moral weights 
and measures, and by much blind factor- 
ing demonstrate the incorrectness of other 
people's answers to similar problems. A 
case in point is the purely mental tabu- 
lation commonly assigned to accuracy, 
when in reality conscience is always one 
of its prime factors. So good workman- 
ship of any kind, generally credited ex- 
clusively to the brain, is an almost in- 
fallible token of a sound conscience, and 
an ideal whose demands are exacting. 
The most accurate and thorough Latin 
teacher whom I ever knew was a man whose 
conscience made as fine exactions in all 
the relations of life as those which he 
respected in the laws of quantity. It was, 
therefore, only one of several logical se- 

117 



Why Love Grows Cold 

quences that he was called "a gentleman 
ad unguen^^ by the unanimous verdict 
of his pupils. 

But theologians have for centuries meas- 
ured men and women by such deceitful 
and elastic phrases as "sound in the 
faith" and "a follower of the old land- 
marks," regardless of the fact that the old 
landmarks witnessed a great many dis- 
graceful doings. Who of us likewise does 
not know the rural region where "he ain't 
a professor" — meaning that he is not con- 
nected with any church — is only one re- 
move from absolute condemnation; and 
"wandered from the faith" — in the same 
arid zone of interpretation — is a vaguely 
comprehensive phrase made to cover every 
phase of doubt from timid falterings over 
the sanctity of the patriarchs and Solo- 
mon's menage, to bold misgivings concern- 
ing the lucidity and efficacy of the Trini- 
tarian concept? But the day has already 

ii8 



Ethical Balances 

come when dumb acquiescence to certain 
dogmas is known to be quite as often 
a sign of moral and intellectual sloth 
and incapacity as of religious girth and 
sinew. 

In a bleaker generation, virtues and vices 
had two colors only, apparently, cardinal 
and black; or those who sat in the seats 
of judgment may have been endowed with 
a less delicate sense of discrimination. 
But like the endless variations of shade 
that have been evolved from the old-fash- 
ioned colors are the varied tints and tones 
of modern morality. As every virtue, 
by a process of evolution, seems capable 
of taking on finer and more scrupulous 
interpretations in its application to the 
various problems of life, so every vice has 
a corresponding possibility of being re- 
fined into shades of invisibility, or into 
tints almost indistinguishable from those 
of virtue itself. And in these very possi- 

119 



Why Love Grows Cold 

bilities may be found the pons asinorum of 
ethical geometry. For one man's virtues 
may be in such a crude and cornersome 
stage of development that they will of- 
fend more than the refined faults of an- 
other man. 

Most mature people have met the pain- 
ful saint and the pleasant sinner, and after 
the meeting they find themselves read- 
justing all their old standards of judgment, 
having discovered in the distribution and 
combination of virtues and vices something 
very similar to the gingerly method with 
which Nature doles out beauty in the hu- 
man face. The perfect face is rarely found, 
and, even when found, it may have been 
purchased at the price of a fearful mort- 
gage upon the intelligence of its possessor, 
so that it fails to satisfy the inner eye 
of the understanding as may a less per- 
fect face in which expression illuminates 
a plain-featured text. If she gives a good 

I20 



Ethical Balances 

pair of eyes, Nature is very reluctant 
to give a good nose or mouth; or, if she 
does very fine work on the nose and mouth, 
she is likely to scamp her work on the eyes 
and forehead. Precisely the same system 
seems to obtain in her dole of moral 
beauty. She gives one man a free helping 
of the cardinal virtues, but scrimps her 
gift of the graces, so that virtue suffers 
ill repute because of its setting. To another 
man she gives only two or three virtues, 
but puts them in such an extremely attrac- 
tive setting of grace that they, and some- 
times — alas! — their contingent vices, are 
more effectual than the other man's dozen 
of virtues. 

To another man she gives a prodigal 
allowance of mental and moral gifts, 
but places him where his early environ- 
ment blights half his best possibilities 
before they have had a chance to unfold. 
Consider the mythical case of Amos Kar- 

121 



Why Love Grows Cold 

mel, who is endowed with the finest in- 
tellectual and moral sense and a strong 
will-power which may be represented by 
9x. But the temptations which fate ar- 
rays in the pathway of Mr. Karmel hap- 
pen to be of I ox power, and the result 
is his downfall and disgrace, the more 
disastrous because he is keenly sensitive 
to his own degradation. 

Another man, Mr. Cornly, of far less 
mental or moral ability and a will-power 
which may be designated by 4X, happens 
to be confronted with only 3X tempta- 
tions, and, though the effort which he puts 
forth to resist them is less than half as 
much as in the case of Mr. Karmel, the 
result is success, a clear conscience and a 
saved reputation. 

To one who knows all the causes and 
all the resisting power in cases like these, 
the world's labels seem too superficially 
obtained to be of much value. Mr. Kar- 

122 



Ethical Balances 

mel may have been a very bad man, but 
there is Httle doubt that with all his sins 
he has resisted more temptations to other 
sins than ten men like Mr. Cornly. His 
is a case like the French nobleman's, of 
whom it was said that " the Lord would 
have to think twice before damning him." 
In the same class with Mr. Karmel belong 
the Tommies found in every rank and 
calling of life. Men and women in whom 
'•^the accursed thing, which is in all of 
us, may be so strong that to battle with 
it and be beaten is not altogether to fail." 
Following the trend of these musings 
it is not difficult to understand why so 
many good women have loved and some- 
times married men whom the world has too 
briefly catalogued as bad — men of the type 
of Aaron Burr, whose good qualities were 
not negotiable at any of the public banks 
where drafts for reputations are honored. 
By instinct, a woman sometimes feels 

123 



Why Love Grows Cold 

what Shakespere may have discovered in 
some other way, that 

'The strawberry grows underneath the nettle, 
And wholesome berries thrive and ripen best 
Neighbored by fruit of baser quality." 

So it occasionally happens that a wom- 
an, like a wise numismatist, may prefer 
a damaged, gold coin — of rare design and 
superscription — to the most perfect of 
untarnished coppers just from the mint. 
Sometimes, indeed, the most accurate 
and convincing proof of the real merit and 
excellence of a man's character may be 
found in the number of sins which people 
are willing to forgive him. This, however, 
is not the easy philosophy of the high- 
way to which a drunkard by the gutter's 
brink a drunkard is and nothing more, 
be he a silent hero like Charles Lamb, 
or any idle vagabond that goes down to 
dusty death by the paths of incelebrity. 

Yet lenient judgments are frequently 
124 



Ethical Balances 

criticised on the ground that they are 
influenced by personal feehng, and such a 
criticism is merited when sentimentaHty 
puts a premium on sin and crime by 
throwing bouquets at the sinners. On the 
other hand, judgments based upon the 
conclusions of gray matter, alone, are 
quite as likely to miss the mark of jus- 
tice as those determined chiefly by the 
feelings. In the solution of problems of 
mathematics and science, the head has 
no occasion to call upon the heart for 
assistance; but in moral problems, the 
discovery of the value of the yijz of 
temperament, environment, and motive 
cannot be performed by purely mental 
processes. It was probably ordained 
that mind and heart should revise and 
sometimes reverse each other's decisions. 
When such a revision is not allowed, the 
result is a distorted verdict like the one 
that called Heine "that German pig." 

125 



Why Love Grows Cold 

It is largely because of its imperfect 
and faulty estimates of men and meas- 
ures that history has been called "a, Mis- 
sissippi of Falsehood." Sacred and pro- 
fane records alike are full of names upon 
which contending traditions and histori- 
ans have alternately heaped obloquy and 
praise. And who can tell us which is the 
truth? Queen Elizabeth, Mary Stuart, 
Marie Antoinette, Cromwell, and Savona- 
rola are only a few of the names, of which 
each has called forth the most contra- 
dictory opinions. Even the celebrities 
who have been most unanimously elected 
to their niche of fame cannot be insured 
against the iconoclastic hammers of later 
investigators. Only a few months ago 
such new and disillusionizing statements 
were published about Luther as might well 
make his disciples drop their bibles — or 
beer-steins— in horror. 

Later still, comes to light testimony 
126 



Ethical Balances 

that will make uncanonical history of the 
legends that painted Carlyle *^unco fey to 
live wi'." And finally there has arisen 
an American who has delved among dusty 
records to bring forth shining vestments 
for Aaron Burr. 

Thus do all our judgments judge us with 
their fugitive and imperfect character, the 
while they exonerate their victims. Even 
our devil — once denounced by theologians 
in dread tones of certainty — is now every- 
where admitted to be not so black as he 
is painted. 

How have such errors crept into his- 
tory? perhaps we ask, when some dis- 
covery destroys an old illusion or tricks 
us with a new one. The answer is easy 
for any one who reads the current news- 
papers and magazines, which will furnish 
many a fact and fancy to the historian 
of our own times. History in the making 
could hardly find a better sample of it- 

127 



Why Love Grows Cold 

self than is given by Professor Miinster- 
berg in his edifying book, "American 
Traits" : 

"In the German language the adjective 
'American' is usually connected with but 
three things. The Germans speak of Ameri- 
can stores, and mean a kind of store 
which I have never seen in this country; 
they speak of American duels, and mean 
an absurd sort of duel which was cer- 
tainly never fought on this continent; 
and finally they speak of American himi- 
bug, and mean by it that kind of humbug 
which flourishes in Berlin just as in Chi- 
cago. But the American man is of course 
very well known. He is a haggard crea- 
ture, with vulgar tastes and brutal man- 
ners, who drinks whisky and chews to- 
bacco, spits, fights, puts his feet on the 
table, and habitually rushes along in wild 
haste, absorbed by a greedy desire for 
the dollars of his neighbor. He does not 

128 



Ethical Balances 

care for education or for art, for the pub- 
lic welfare or for justice, except so far as 
they mean money to him. Corrupt from 
top to toe, he buys legislation and courts 
and government ; and when he wants fun, 
he lynches innocent negroes on Madison 
Square in New York or in the Boston Pub- 
lic Garden. He has his family home usu- 
ally in a sky-scraper of twenty-four sto- 
ries ; his business is founded on misleading 
advertisements; his newspapers are filled 
with accounts of murders ; and his church- 
es swarm with hypocrites." 

Although Professor Miinsterberg has 
made a heroic attempt to assist Truth to 
rise again from the very crushed condi- 
tion to which his nation has reduced her, 
it is doubtful whether she will be able to 
walk on German soil — ^without limping — 
for several decades to come. 

The first meeting of any two people — 
and their immediate and later judgments 
9 129 



Why Love Grows Cold 

of each other — especially if they are of 
different races, are always as unique and 
interesting as the result of a new combi- 
nation of gases or acids in the laboratory. 
On meeting hydrogen, the majority of 
her fellow-elements would doubtless pro- 
nounce her a somewhat stiff and distant 
or even a snobbish gas; but when oxy- 
gen is introduced to her, other verdicts 
are reversed and her qualities find a new 
and ardent appreciation. The psychical 
counterpart of this chemical game of the 
elements is piquantly set forth by Emer- 
son : " Do you think the youth has no 
force because he cannot speak to you 
and me ? Hark ! in the next room who 
spoke so clear and emphatic ? Good heav- 
ens ! it is he ! it is that very lump of bash- 
fulness and phlegm which for weeks has 
done nothing but eat when you were by, 
that now rolls out these words like bell- 
strokes." 



Ethical Balances 

Not only are we a thousand different 
selves to as many different people whose 
influence in a greater or less degree con- 
ditions our thought and speech; but as 
the sea continually changes color and tide 
under the influence of the sun and moon, 
so do we differ from hour to hour under 
the varying conditions with which life 
tries us, and no man knows our general 
average. Clouds, sun, rain, snow, heat, 
cold, food, drink, raiment, success, and fail- 
ure, if called upon the witness-stand, would 
each give a different report of the same 
man's character. Likewise, hunger, thirst, 
health, wealth, and illness have been known 
to change the entire pitch of the self's 
expression. How many a man is there 
whose physical debilities so encroach upon 
the soul's delectable grounds that the full- 
est possibilities of what the real self might 
be, under normal physical conditions, is 
never apparent except under the influence 

131 



Why Love Grows Cold 

of some stimulus! From this point of 
view there was less of paradox than the 
ear catches in the admonition which 
Lamb's sister gave him, "Go and drink, 
Charles, and be yourself." 

Effects like these, wrought by a cause 
so palpably artificial, we are wont to 
dismiss with an inherited shrug of dis- 
approval ; but there are a great many dif- 
ferent kinds of stimuli. Some of the causes 
which affect our own estimates of our- 
selves are scarcely less artificial than those 
which originate in grape-juice. When a 
woman of the highest genius could assert 
that the consciousness of being well-dressed 
imparts an inward tranquillity which all 
the comforts of religion fail to bestow, 
what can be expected of the methods of 
self-valuation adopted by the average 
man or woman whose religious experience 
is a somewhat nebulous affair? If the 
facts were published, the real grounds for 

132 



Ethical Balances 

our opinions of ourselves would furnish 
many choice examples of non sequitur, 
A certain amount of inerrancy in self- 
knowledge may be possible to a very sim- 
ple man who has the natural cleavage of 
sainthood, and no observable cleavage in 
any other direction. But self-knowledge 
is quite another matter for those who 
have a cleavage in so many directions 
that they feel themselves brothers and sis- 
ters to the mutable Mrs. Hawksbee, whom 
Kipling has celebrated : "At a moderate 
estimate there were about three-and- 
twenty sides to that lady's character. 
Some men say more." 

Upon this very mobility of the soul, 
which furnishes the world with so many 
conflicting testimonies, the meliorist stakes 
his strongest hope, while his despair is 
the man who cannot change. On the other 
hand, the posssibility of a certain fixity 
of character, through all the phases 



Why Love Grows Cold 

in which it manifests itself, is a belief 
which most of us cherish — especially of 
ourselves; a fixity like the course and 
marginal contour of a river whose waters 
are continually changing, now swollen 
by limpid showers from heaven and anon 
by mundane tributaries of more doubtful 
composition. What the color, volume, 
and velocity may be a hundred or two 
hundred miles from its source, the moun- 
tain brook never knows. Nor more closely 
guessed are our capacities for good or 
evil. The diamond, though the hardest 
substance known, can be changed to 
graphite when subjected to intense heat. 
The air, also, after resisting the tests 
of many centuries, at last — in liquid form 
— surrenders its old reputation with the 
disclosure of most biting characteristics. 
So the most reticent and discreet man, 
though his discretion has served him well 
with ten thousand and two people, may 

134 



Ethical Balances 

find somewhat in the ten thousand and 
third which will unlock his reserve and 
plunder its treasure. 

Moreover, it sometimes suits the whimsy 
of Chance to single out such unique ex- 
periences and publish them as represen- 
tative. After this manner are reputations 
made and unmade, and centuries may come 
and go before slow-handed Justice audits 
and corrects the false accounts of Time. 

The larger share of the false estimates 
of moral as well as mental qualities are 
obviously due to the fact that "a man is 
appreciated only by his equals or superiors," 
and, fortunately or unfortunately, there 
are few people who are in all respects 
the equals of anybody else. It was, then, 
a more universal dilemma than Hegel 
knew he was describing when he said that 
only one man understood him, and he mis- 
imderstood him. When even those who 
understand misunderstand, it is not logi- 

^35 



Why Love Grows Cold 

cal to expect precision in the duck's opin- 
ion of the nightingale. And how many 
ducks attempt the role of musical critic ! 
And how many, alas! of the world's judg- 
ments are made by people who weigh 
everything on hay-scales — good, kind peo- 
ple who ask, "What's the use of an edu- 
cation if you ain't going to teach?" 
As though a forest in whose tree-tops the 
poet's fancies go nesting with the birds, 
should be valued solely for the amount 
of lumber that can be taken from it. 

But of such are the judgments of the 
market-place : 

" The butcher that served Shakespere with his meat 
Doubtless esteemed him little, as a man 
Who knew not how the market-prices ran." 

To the want-wit the mental treasures 
of his neighbor will be forever under lock 
and key, even as the complex sources of 
disposition and character are hidden from 
the man whose own spirit is numb and 

136 



Ethical Balances 

unresponsive. A beam of light that falls 
upon a dark, opaque body will never disclose 
its mystic color-treasure, but let it fall 
upon a mirror or prism and straightway 
its latent rainbows are revealed. This 
prismatic or refracting power is possessed 
by people of insight — which is the twin- 
sister of sympathy — and their judgments 
are likely to go back of symptoms and 
effects as Stevenson's did when he wrote 
Sidney Colvin that some one's "headache 
was cross," a discriminating touch matched 
by Howells in his explanation of the dis- 
position of Mela Dryfoos : " She felt too 
well corporeally ever to be quite cross." 
By popular verdicts, however, amiability 
is imputed to its possessor for righteous- 
ness, regardless of the fact that in a ma- 
jority of cases the much-applauded " even 
disposition" is only an unanalyzed eu- 
phuism for bovine placidity, meriting little 
more credit than the unruffled, unreasoned 

137 



Why Love Grows Cold 

serenity of a Jersey cow. Who has not 
met the healthy man or woman who is 
transformed into a dangerous character 
by a toothache or a touch of neuralgia? 

Only a very small per cent of the world's 
judgn?ents question what lies back of a 
man's acts, or weigh the unknown motives 
that turn the scale when a good deed is 
done, or an evil one left undone. In the 
days when orthodoxy shed its more lurid 
beams upon the ways of the wicked, the 
fear of hell had an undeniable power to 
"haud the wretch in order," and its con- 
straining force sometimes seemed to suc- 
ceed in grafting the fruits of righteousness 
upon the scrubbiest kind of a tree. Lesser 
fears were — and still are — responsible for 
many a good or bad deed of omission or 
commission. Nearly three-fourths of the 
conduct of Mr. Henpecked are overruled, 
not by an immediate Providence, but by 
fear of his wife. The result may be 

138 



Ethical Balances 

almost flawless propriety on the part of 
that gentleman, so far as outward observ- 
ances go, but inwardly he may be not 
many removes from a coward. 

In other instances, fear of what one's 
neighbor or society may say is the rul- 
ing influence in a man or woman's life. 
In some respects this possibility is fortu- 
nate, since the sum total of good conduct 
is undeniably increased by outer restraints 
which influence the acts of those who 
would never feel the finer restraints of 
honor. But while some of the visible 
results of this external coercion may be 
identical with the efl'ects of a higher inner 
compulsion, which guides the man of 
honor, the amount of merit and respect 
due in the two cases is by no means iden- 
tical. 

Mr. Circumspect drops a five-dollar bill 
upon the contribution-plate, and the man 
who sits nearest to him may do the same. 

139 



Why Love Grows Cold 

But though their financial conditions 
may be precisely the same, it by no means 
follows that each will be credited with 
five dollars in the apocryphal ledger of 
the recording angel. The celestial entry 
for one man may be : Two dollars from 
force of habit, which originated in a mixed 
impulse, compounded of very unequal 
parts of fear, charity, and an imitative 
instinct, and three dollars for the eyes 
of the deacons who passed the plates 
and the brethren and sisters nearest the 
contributor. 

The other man's entry may be : One dol- 
lar from force of habit — whose origin 
may be too complex for the imagination 
to decipher — and the other four, to be 
seen of men. Any pastor who doubts 
the possibility of such uncomplimentary 
entries against the members of his flock, 
should hold an evening service and order 
the electricity to be turned off while his 

140 



Ethical Balances 

deacons are passing the plates. Then he 
might compare the donations made in the 
darkness with those given in the broad 
light of day. At first, of course, the good 
people would be on their guard and their 
givings might be doubled. But if the sys- 
tem were continued indefinitely the "nat- 
ural current" would set in, and most in- 
teresting statistics could be gathered. 

How many churches, I wonder, would 
dare to take up their "offerings" in the 
dark? If some pastor wished to put his 
congregation "on their honor," as some 
professors do their pupils by leaving 
them alone during a written examination, 
he might adopt a device like the one here 
suggested. It would possibly wound the 
feelings of those who make their contri- 
butions independently of external consider- 
ations; but it might also waken a sense 
of honor in some of the others, and when 
that sense had acquired the habit of be- 

141 



Why Love Grows Cold 

ing awake enough to be trusted not to 
doze, the Church could return to its old 
methods. 

In this connection, the tale of little 
Jimmy's scientific begging — though not 
complimentary to womankind — deserves a 
hearing : 

Tommy — "Why didn't ye touch that 
high-stepping lady fer a quarter?" 

Jimmy — "Wool in yer tinker; she was 
alone. When there's two of 'em each 
shells out handsome, so the other won't 
think she's stingy, see?" 

Other men and women give alms like 
Barrie's Mary, in "Two of Them." "My 
charities," declared that impulsive heroine, 
" are only a hideous kind of selfishness. I 
never give anything to that poor man 
on the street corner because I see he needs 
it, but only occasionally when I feel hap- 
pier than usual." 

If one could sift the policies of nations 
142 



Ethical Balances 

in war and in peace, similar dividends of 
chaff would be found among the motives 
behind nearly every act that looms large 
on the heroic horizon. How many a 
purpose that starts out erect and single- 
eyed shows crooked and double-eyed ere 
half its race is run! "What would some 
other power do, or how will this affect 
the public coffers?" is the vitiating fear 
that has wasted more than one nation's 
golden opportunity. 

As the motives behind public and private 
acts are hidden, so, likewise, are those 
behind the deeds that are planned, but 
never executed, the enterprises whose " cur- 
rents turn awry and lose the name of 
action." 

Simple slothful procrastination of wrong- 
doing — such as Browning celebrates in 
*^The Statue and the Bust" — may be the 
cause which robs many an undone iniq- 
uity of its small negative savor of right- 

143 



Why Love Grows Cold 

eousness. If the procrastination is due 
to a lack of courage, or the mere absence 
of opportunity, it is an open question 
whether the culprit who has not the spirit 
to carry ^ut his purposes does not stand 
upon a lower plane than his fellow-sinner 
who boldly accomplishes his designs. 

It is also conceivable that the man 
who for a long time harbors an evil pur- 
pose is (himself) more contaminated by 
its corrosive influence than he would have 
been had he executed it and antidoted 
its remembrance with genuine remorse. 

A good deed, likewise, may be so long 
procrastinated that, when it is performed, 
equity should deduct from its face value 
a large discount equal to the interest 
on the act from the proper time of its 
performance to the actual date of its 
doing. The man who procrastinates is a 
first cousin to the man who does not 
keep his promises. If he procrastinates 

144 



Ethical Balances 

long enough, they are one and the same. 
Tito Melema intended to pay the ransom 
for his foster-father's liberty, some time, 
but he never did. The chronic procrasti- 
nator is generally a coward in the mak- 
ing. 

Closely related to this subject is "A 
Study in Black Sheep," a chapter from 
the diary of Elbertini, the hermit philoso- 
pher of Nulpart. Elbertini devoted sever- 
al years of his life to the collection of 
biographical data concerning such blem- 
ished celebrities as Francois Villon, Paul 
Verlaine, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Byron, 
Turner, Charles the Second, and a score 
of other heroes of the same piebald genus. 
"In each of these men," writes Elbertini, 
"the lowest vices and the most exalted 
virtues continually bouted with each other 
for supremacy. By the same wide meas- 
ure by which they surpassed the ordinary 
man on the finer sides of their natures, 
lo 145 



Why Love Grows Cold 

theyrfell below him in the depth of deg- 
radation to which they allowed them- 
selves to sink. Their characters, indeed, 
suggested a fabric capriciously woven of 
the rarest kind of gold thread alternating 
with fibers of the coarsest of common 
hemp. 

"Yet each man appointed and kept 
terrible judgment days with himself, when 
all the evidence for and against the de- 
fendant was self-measured with a candor 
rarely known in more public tribunals. 
In addition to the records of these self- 
judgments — found in their poems and let- 
ters to friends — one finds touching inciden- 
tal testimony to their habit of introspec- 
tion in the fact that seventeen of these 
ill-starred celebrities, in their later years, 
made a collection of portraits and biog- 
raphies of others as badly eminent as 
themselves, and in eleven of these cases 
the collectors published enthusiastic de- 

146 



Ethical Balances 

fenses of a number of their brethren whose 
blackness they pathetically endeavored to 
bleach by setting their more ingratiating 
qualities over against the lesser lapses 
of some notoriously angular saint; ... a 
proceeding," concludes Elbertini, "which 
would have come with better grace, and 
withal more convincingly, from one of the 
saints than from one of the sinners." 

Balancing his own accounts, the un- 
godly man is prone to make evil chance 
shoulder — and perhaps justly — some of the 
responsibility for his misdeeds. But the 
man of good character is generally happy 
in the belief that the credit for his deport- 
ment belongs entirely to himself, forgetting 
that from the achievements of character, 
as from all others, no man can exclude 
that invisible factor, chance, which — hap- 
pening to them all — keeps the race from 
the swift and the battle from the strong. 
The best men, in proportion to their 

147 



Why Love Grows Cold 

honesty and clearness of vision, have 
most frankly acknowledged the presence 
of this unseen and unmeasured force, as 
Emerson did in his stanza, "Grace" : 

" How much, preventing God, how much I owe 
To the defenses Thou hast round me set; 
Example, custom, fear, occasion slow, 
These scorned bondmen were my parapet. 
I dare not peep over this parapet 
To gauge with glance the roaring gulf below, 
The depths of sin to which I had descended, 
Had not these me against myself defended." 

With equal modesty, Marcus Aurelius 
finds an external ancestor for each one 
of his virtues, tracing their origin to 
various kinsmen and friends; and when, 
after an exhaustive enumeration, he still 
finds in himself a few more virtues, un- 
accounted for, any residue of merit that 
might attach to himself he gratefully and 
ingenuously makes over to the gods. 



148 



SEVERAL WORDS TO THE WISE. 

"Perhaps it may turn out a sang, 
Perhaps turn out a sermon." 

The Gradgrinds are a long-lived race, 
and, while their breath is in them, in vain 
may authors who pass through their 
hands hope to be known, save as reels 
around which to wind an appalling num- 
ber of dates, stock phrases, and well- 
frayed opinions. 

In view of this fact and the extraordi- 
nary vitality of the Gradgrinds, a direct 
appeal is made to authors themselves. 
Let no thoughtless genius say in his heart 
that posterity's memory will be sufficient 
unto the evil of its day. The limit of 
forced information may be reached, and 
an age may come when pupils will suc- 
cumb in the attempt to learn the details 

149 



Why Love Grows Cold 

of the nine thousandth man of impor- 
tance. For the purveyors of so-called edu- 
cation are too often, Hke the lawyers, 
denounced by Holy Writ, who "lade men 
with burdens grievous to be borne." 

That these burdens, now rolling up into 
a veritable Pelion for posterity, may be 
in a measure lightened, we beseech the 
sympathetic ear of great ones yet to be. 
Thus far, history shows that nearly all 
famous men have been inexcusably incon- 
siderate of the effects of their actions 
on posterity. Whole nations, even, have 
been culpable in this respect. Impelled 
by some local and transitory disturbance, 
they have selfishly indulged in countless 
unnecessary wars, utterly regardless of 
the continual strain which posterity must 
undergo to remember their dates, causes, 
and effects. Perchance the heroes and 
sages of other days could not foresee the 
grievances which they were forcing upon 

150 



Several Words to the Wise 

succeeding generations. Few of them may 
have dreamed that their names, habits, 
and peculiarities — along with the date of 
their advent into the world and their 
exit from it — would be made into an in- 
tellectual pike de rhistance for growing 
youths. But with the example of incon- 
siderate authors before them, there is no 
longer any excuse for continued negligence 
on the part of those whose greatness is 
as yet in the bud. 

For still other reasons the wooers of 
fame are earnestly entreated to cast a 
searching eye down the Avernian slopes 
of the future, and view the inevitable 
results of the book-worship into which 
the civilized world is steadily drifting. 
After such an inspection, can one fail to 
see the dawn of the day when original 
ideas will have become impossible, save 
upon the lonely moors and hilltops of il- 
literacy, where Nature, unrivaled, still 

151 



Why Love Grows Cold 

calls from her own deeps to the untroub- 
led deeps in the soul of man ? A few sim- 
ple souls that dwell beyond the echoes of 
Bookdom will perhaps remain to illustrate 
the primitive processes of purely original 
thinking. But the thoughts of the "well- 
read man" will have become as a swollen 
torrent — or, worse, a sluggish pool — fed 
by the millions of literary rivulets that 
have crossed the centuries between David 
the Psalmist and David the Harumite, 
and man will have ceased to possess any 
very permanent and differentiated ego, 
his brain having degenerated into a dark 
limbo of other men's ideas. 

When an incipient celebrity has given 
serious audience to such grave possibili- 
ties as these, there will be but one course 
which he can follow, if he has the good 
of his race at heart, namely, turning a 
blind eye to all the coquettings of fame, 
to spend the fire of genius in some cov- 

152 



Several Words to the Wise 

ertly benign way, which cannot be made 
recountable to posterity. In other words, 
he may do as much good by stealth as 
he chooses, but he should so cover his 
stealth with a second cloak of stealth that 
he will ^^ never blush to find it fame." 

But few men will be prepared to reach 
this high pitch of altruism. Yet a second 
compromising course is open to those 
who must have fame. The man of renown 
should do all in his power to make the 
facts which pertain to his life easy of as- 
similation. This may require no little 
foresight on his part, but he ought to 
feel amply repaid by the thought that 
he is lightening the labors of those 
who are to come after him. Imprimis, 
there is much in a name, especially if it 
is hard to remember. The Latin maxim. 
Prima lex naturcB parentes deligerey as 
translated by the philosophical youth, 
should be the motto of the man of fame : 



Why Love Grows Cold 

"It is the first law of Nature that chil- 
dren should choose their parents." 

There is another consideration which 
is properly prior to this; namely, the 
choice of one's birthplace. Numerous in- 
stances come to mind of heedless authors 
who have been born in old historical 
towns, whose complex influence it has 
been necessary to trace upon the author 
and his works. The modest and consid- 
erate author will be born in the country, 
in a lone house, miles from any neighbor. 
There he will live as long as it is possible 
for him to learn anything. This will 
greatly simplify his external relations 
with the world, and save his biographers 
an endless amount of trouble. Moreover, 
it will redound to his credit to be great, 
with comparatively little in his environ- 
ment to make him so. 

The second care of the genius will be the 
choice of a suitable name. For reasons 

154 



Several Words to the Wise 

already mentioned, short and attractive 
names are most desirable. Foreign names 
should be avoided as in bad taste. Plain 
Peter Stokes is preferable to the more 
sounding names of Boulainvilliers, Pour- 
ceaugnac, and D'Anguesseau. Such names 
as these last have a tendency to irritate 
a student, and create from the outset 
an unfavorable impression in his mind, 
while a name like Lamb commends itself 
at once to the memory by its tenacious 
associations, and prepossesses the pupil 
in favor of the author. The odor of a 
rose may be independent of its name, 
but there is an indefinable aroma pecu- 
liar to an author's name, which is not 
une quantity negligeable. 

What could have consoled us, or him, 
if Tennyson had borne the name of Flip- 
kins or Snoggerton? In the selection of 
names, it must be admitted that writers 
of the English language have generally 

155 



Why Love Grows Cold 

displayed excellent taste; witness Shake- 
spere, Spenser, and Milton. 

A third point which every author should 
make a matter of conscience is the date 
of his birth. The desirability of begin- 
ning life on the first diurnal tick of the 
century, or upon a date already grooved 
in the memory by some other famous 
man, or in such a year as ;^^Sy 444? or 
555 is too manifest to need demonstra- 
tion. The more nearly authors can model 
the facts of their external life after the 
following outline, the more acceptable 
will they be to the children of Mr. Grad- 
grind : 

"Peter Crutch, son of Peter Crutch; born 
in 1800, native of Duck-Dell; nothing 
known of his life till he was thirty; no 
relatives except father and mother (and 
they of no note) ; left an orphan at forty, 
never married, and never was in love; 
died in 1880, and buried in Duck-Dell." 

156 



Several Words to the Wise 

In spite of his carelessness concerning 
the date of his birth, we have an amiable 
feeling toward Chaucer, because he chose 
the even year 1400 in which to say his 
adieus to the world. Similarly, one can 
overlook the mediocrity of Fontenelle, 
in consideration of the fact that he took 
the pains to live exactly one hundred 
years. 

A fourth aim of great men should be the 
regulation of their early mental and moral 
tendencies. It ought to be unnecessary to 
remark that a seasonable curbing of rep- 
rehensible habits will be advantageous 
to authors themselves, as well as to pos- 
terity, in whose name we plead. It is a 
well-known fact that too many great 
men have been precocious children, thus 
establishing an undesirable precedent for 
children who come after them. The nat- 
ural effect of such an example is to dis- 
courage those whose talents are not patent 

157 



Why Love Grows Cold 

until maturity. Indeed, there may be a 
reasonable presumption that many of the 
flowers that blush unseen have finally 
been discouraged from blushing at all 
by the precocious and gourdlike attain- 
ments of their brothers. 

Not less worthy of reprimand is it for 
an author to have a multiplicity of love- 
affairs. In this did great Goethe err. 
Pity the sorrows of the simple-hearted 
pupil who is told to "look up" the life 
of this oversusceptible Deutscher, who 
further complicated the accounts of his 
life by being born in such a historical 
city as Frankfort-on-the-Main. Behold the 
perplexed student preparing for recitation 
the life of Goethe. He reads of Gretchen, 
Charitas, Katchen, Frederike, Lotte, and 
Maximiliane; bewildered, he turns over 
leaf after leaf, but to find more like them, 
bearing the names Lili, Frau von Stein, 
Christine, and Marianne; so that the re- 

158 



Several Words to the Wise 

suit of the pupil's first reading is likely 
to be a confused mental composite of 
Goethe's "ewige weibliche." 

Even were he careless of the effect upon 
himself of such an undignified declension 
of amor as Goethe's, the coming sage 
must remember the effect of his example 
upon posterity, for the X-raying eye of 
the modern biographer will surely glare 
upon all the sinuous ways in which his 
feet may tread, and the cloak of conceal- 
ment, worn by the sinful celebrity of pro- 
biographical days, may not avail him. 

Nor should the thoughtfulness of great 
men end with the care of their morals. 
Physically, they should endeavor to bear 
some peculiar mark which would easily 
impress itself upon the memory. A huge 
nose, bushy eyebrows, or feet of untoward 
dimensions would serve the purpose, and 
for such a cause should be borne with 
resignation by the owner. Many great 

159 



Why Love Grows Cold 

men and women have been obliging in 
this respect, and as a consequence are 
remembered with a vivid accuracy which 
does not accompany the recollection of 
the beautiful ordinary. Thus, Byron, 
though beautiful, is recognized by his 
limp; De Quincey, by his deformed stat- 
ure; and Milton, by his blindness. Michael 
Angelo, whether for reasons we have set 
forth or not, indulged in a quarrel which 
gave him a bent nose for life. Moreover, 
such marks as these are more significant 
than at first appears; for a student 
possessed with a fair gift of construction, 
knowing the story of Michael's nose, might 
make several correct inductions concern- 
ing his character. Byron's limping, like- 
wise, might be made to account for many 
of his doleful verses. 

If Nature has not particularly empha- 
sized any feature, there are other means 
by which the obliging genius may en- 

i6o 



Several Words to the Wise 

hance the interest taken in himself; to 
wit, by his mode of dress and other habits. 
Among men, especially, an eccentricity 
of dress would be more observable than 
among the fickly-clad sex. The fact that 
Mr. Kope made a wide red sash do duty 
for a vest might awaken more interest 
in that gentleman than the stock an- 
nouncement that his style was " even dig- 
nified and profound." Other methods of 
branding one's self for posterity's sake 
will occur to the thoughtful; little habits 
like taking salt in one's coffee or vinegar 
in one's tea might serve the end. 

The author of prescience should also 
bear in mind that he may be writing 
something that will serve as a textbook 
for generations to come. Facing such a 
contingency, let him be cautious, for he 
will be more beloved and cherished by 
students if he does not indulge in too 
many reminiscences concerning obsolete 
II i6i 



Why Love Grows Cold 

heroes, legendary characters, and rites. 
In this respect, Horace was sedulously 
heedless, and his continual references to 
mythological reprobates, and his own 
Falernian feats sometimes border on the 
garrulous, excusable in Horace, but not 
to be tolerated in his bibulous successors 
of 1900. 

There are several other last mottoes 
that should be engraved upon the hearts 
of those wishing to make their lives sub- 
lime. Of these the chiefest relate to the 
gift of continuance, which leads full many 
an author astray. Novelists are par- 
ticularly tempted to abuse this gift, as 
well as saintly clergymen. How many an 
author has continued writing until his 
works — like the victories of Pyrrhus — 
have nearly undone him? In these days, 
when everybody's cousin writes a book, 
this caution should be taken most se- 
riously, else will the world clamor for a 

162 



Several Words to the Wise 

literary Malthus to protect it from gen- 
iuses of the eighty-volume caHber. Of 
course, such external interference would 
be unnecessary if authors themselves would 
exercise any conscience in the matter. But 
have they ever done so, as a rule? Do 
not the majority of them pour out the ut- 
termost dregs of their literary wine- 
cups — ^nay, more, have not some of them 
poured in water and given us the rinsings ? 
Naturally, a Malthusian statute, like 
the one under consideration, should be sub- 
ject to limitations. An author who had 
enshrined himself in everybody's heart, 
as several of our American authors have 
done, might be granted a literary kind 
of " eminent domain" to overrule statutes 
and dispossess more unworthy holders 
of book-shelf space. Such cases could be 
settled by a popular vote. Most of us, 
however, would be willing to sit by in 
silent heroism while nearly all our fa- 

163 



Why Love Grows Cold 

vorite authors were being boiled down to 
five volumes. But, in many instances, 
the favorite authors have done the boil- 
ing down themselves, and that is why they 
are favorite. As for the authors who are 
not favorite, we could see the boiling- 
down process end in entire evaporation, 
and look on dry-eyed. 

In an age possessed with the mania of 
illustrating the "extreme malleability of 
an idea," it will doubtless sound revolu- 
tionary to suggest that every author — 
potential or kinetic — should leave unsaid 
all that he cannot say in ten duodecimo 
volumes. This will seem especially Qui- 
xotic to the author whose literary Missis- 
sippi has already run half its length and 
cannot be dammed, except in a sense 
too strenuous to be advocated by the pres- 
ent writer. 

The truth is, many authors glide into 
their tenth, twentieth, and fortieth vol- 

164 



Several Words to the Wise 

umes by a kind of acquired velocity, or 
in obedience to the law of inertia, which, 
unfortunately, applies to moving bodies 
as well as to those in a state of rest. 
Would they but pause and consider the 
amount and quality of our affection for 
a sixty-volumed Trollope and a three- 
volumed Lamb, the inference would surely 
have some restraining force. But no; 
we feel that our exhortation has been in 
vain. The fountain-penned author heeds 
us as little as the widow about to be 
wedded again, either on the plea that she 
made so poor or so good a performance 
of her first venture. Similarly, the author, 
who fails or makes a success of his first 
experiment, finds equally cogent reasons 
for continuing to write. 

Yet hoping upon despair, one would 
advance another argument to convince 
the author who is in the " nineteenthly- 
brethren" stage; how can readers feel 

165 



Why Love Grows Cold 

anything but a scattered interest and af- 
fection for a literary family of eighty? 
The very effort to remember so many 
distracts and blurs one's impressions. 
The reader is like the man who tried to 
mourn over the grave of his six wives, 
buried communistically under one monu- 
ment; but the bereaved man went away, 
sorrowing for the sorrow which he could 
not individualize from its perplexing col- 
lectivism. 

Lastly, and with increasingly solemn ca- 
dence, shall not the coming millions who 
may feel an affinity for ink be warned 
that the first essential of authorship is 
to have something to say? Even a sec- 
ond-rate author might achieve wonders 
by resolutely damming his mental flow 
till its volume would give it turning power, 
instead of trying to run his literary mill- 
wheels before he has built his dam. How 
many an author has let his thoughts 

i66 



Several Words to the Wise 

trickle away in shallow brooklets, as fast 
as they came, like the chattering waters 
of an idle stream, when he might have 
made golden grindings had he patiently 
waited for his pond to fill? Many other 
hints does Nature give upon this text; 
when milk is allowed to stand a sufficient 
length of time, there is a cream thick 
enough to be worth taking off. Sap, too, 
though very worthless in its native state 
as it comes from the maple-tree, is a solid 
and toothsome commodity when it has 
been boiled down. 

Yet, above all, let no author imagine 
that a prolonged study of rhetorical rules 
(even as carefully revised as the ones 
contained in this paper) will enable him 
to make a literary Niagara out of the con- 
tents of an intellectual pint-cup. Prob- 
ably the world will never know how many 
disappointments have been due to the 
advice of stupid and "well-meaning" 

167 



Why Love Grows Cold 

textbooks which counsel the student to 
"model his style" upon some author or 
authors. From such deep-toned oracles 
the guileless pupil would infer that a 
cherry-tree might produce Baldwins, if 
it were only planted near enough to an 
apple-tree of that variety. Nevertheless, 
it is a solemn fact that it never will. As 
surely as every tree bringeth forth of its 
own kind, so surely every author — unless 
he steals — must bring forth his own kind 
of literary fruit. This is no attempt to 
belittle the value of good rhetorical train- 
ing ; but when all is said, the fact remains 
that "/(? style c est Vhomme meme^'' and 
hence is something which cannot be super- 
induced. 

A good teacher, proper textbooks, and 
the study of standard authors do for the 
writer precisely what the gardener does 
for the plants under his care. The teacher 
pulls up the weeds, enriches the ground, 

i68 



Several Words to the Wise 

and supplies the rain of encouragement 
in a dry season; yet, hoe as he may, he 
cannot make a grass-blade blossom like 
the rose or train a rhododendron to climb 
a trellis. 

" But, how am I to know whether I have 
genius or not?" asks the inky-fingered 
novice, struggling to emerge from inglo- 
rious muteness. 

The signs are many which make this 
point clear ; but one of the surest is this : 
If you were foreordained to utter the 
thoughts that breathe and burn, you 
would never need to rack your brain for 
a topic upon which to expend your in- 
spiratio scribendi. If thoughts do not 
come to you and beg to be treated, you 
may safely conclude that they are seek- 
ing some more skillful hand. If, on the 
contrary, ideas attack you with tentacular 
persistence, you may fairly infer that you 
should give them a hearing. How to ob- 

169 



Why Love Grows Cold 

tain that hearing is another and a very- 
difficult matter. Formerly, clearness of 
style was thought to ingratiate the author 
into the favor of the literary public. But 
in this generation of fads and societies for 
clubbing out ideas, which can be reached 
in no other way, one hardly dares advo- 
cate beautiful simplicity as a winning 
hand. The respect and honor once shown 
clear thinking, as revealed in clear writing, 
has given way, in certain regions, to a kind 
of apotheosis of mental mistiness. Given 
two ideas, precisely equivalent in kind and 
value, bearing to each other the ratio 
of one-half to five-hundred thousandths, 
and the club element in literary circles 
will utterly ignore the former, while with 
annotated editions and encyclopedias it 
proceeds to fill the air with erudite dust 
which passes for a literary atmosphere. 
In spite of all such deterrent thoughts, 
the honest author — forgetting clubs that 

170 



Several Words to the Wise 

are behind or before— will unswervingly 
follow the leadings of common sense, 
which evermore applauds the beauty of 
clearness and brevity in literary style. 
For, in spite of illustrious examples — 
seemingly to the contrary — the profundity 
of a pool is in no way increased by mak- 
ing its waters so muddy that one cannot 
see the bottom. 

And this farewell maxim, my dutiful 
literary Laertes, is a first cousin to two 
others which declare that rhetorical heavi- 
ness is not literary weight, nor dullness 
dignity or depth, or a symptom of either, 
but quite the contrary, as Landor ob- 
served : " Genuine humor and true wit 
require a sound and capacious mind which 
is always a grave one." If, then my gen- 
tle genius, you should feel a smile steal- 
ing in among your fancies, like a sunbeam 
touching the morning gossamers, do not 
cruelly bar its entrance, awed by the vision 

171 



Why Love Grows Cold 

of some ghoulish critic destitute of a sense 
of humor; but rather take counsel with 
your own bosom, or with the admonish- 
ing shades of all the Lambs and Lowells 
whose natural twinklings have lightened 
the literary firmament and won the grati- 
tude of posterity. 

For humor is not the invention of any 
man, but a quality given him by his 
Maker, who has allowed a similar iri- 
descence to oversheen the magic ship-of- 
pearl and the shimmering dewdrop at our 
feet. 



172 



BETWEEN THE LINES. 

In spite of advertisements that promise 
to erase from the face the records of time, 
sin, and sorrow, Nature's stenographic 
wrinkle-reports can never be so garbled 
that they will not give a more or less 
authentic bulletin of character. When this 
facial bulletin is written with the indeli- 
ble pencil of habit, the shorthand notes 
are sometimes so clear that even a child 

may decipher them. When none is visi- 
ble, the absence of lines and wrinkles in 
the faces of adults is itself an announce- 
ment of inner qualities and outward con- 
ditions which may be accurately inter- 
preted by the careful observer. 

The smooth, unwritten brow and cheek, 
accompanied by an expression of almost 
bovine calm, generally belong to the man 

173 



Why Love Grows Cold 

or woman who is free from financial anx- 
ieties, religious doubts, and dyspepsia. 
The man or woman, on the other hand, 
who has a doubtful or intermittent rev- 
enue or physical or spiritual indigestion 
is almost certain to wear a face that is 
little less than a tragic biographical poster. 

A study from life of the origin and de- 
velopment of facial script brings to light 
the fact that women — especially students 
and women in business — have more wrin- 
kles and have them earlier than men, 
probably because of their more sensitive 
response to pain and pleasure, or perhaps 
because they can find more things to worry 
about than their brothers. 

Investigations involving the comparison 
of the wrinkles of men and women are 
beset with difficulties, for a man, when he 
has reached the age when wrinkles are 
permissible, can drape the lower part of 
his face with guileful whiskers that some- 

174 



Between the Lines 

times conceal two-thirds of Nature's rec- 
ords, which are mercilessly revealed on a 
woman' s face. One almost suspects Nature 
of abetting the cause of man, and assist- 
ing him to draw a veil over the records of 
the past, so that he may win favor which 
he might not gain in a whiskerless state. 
Women, being provided with no such nat- 
ural resources for softening the truths of 
the wrinkle, resort to artificial devices, 
such as veils, powder, paint, and facial 
massage. And although all these attempts 
to make Time turn backward in his flight 
have been the subject of masculine quips 
and jests as perennial as the mother-in- 
law joke, who can say to what men might 
have resorted had they not been provided 
with the more natural ambush of whiskers 
from behind which to hurl their verbal 
javelins ? 

But such queries have less interest for 
us than the psychological whys and where- 

175 



Why Love Grows Cold 

fores to which the scowl and the wrin- 
kle point. Before approaching these prob- 
lems, it may be well to map out the ter- 
ritory usually furrowed and tilled by the 
wrinkle. The five great wrinkle-grants 
are located at the corners of the eyes, 
nose, mouth, between the eyebrows, and 
over the entire expanse of the forehead. 
In extreme old age. Time further en- 
croaches on the facial reserves by driving 
his plowshare all over the face. As a 
result, the firm, smooth cheeks, which 
poets may have likened to a — one dares 
not write the name of the now slinguified 
fruit — are criss-crossed into a diminutive 
checkerboard, whose charms the bard 
cheerfully resigns to the prosaic pen of the 
philosopher. Before him lies the task 
of explaining how and why wrinkles come, 
how they may be prevented, and which 
ones should be allowed to stay. 
To the first question, one may give the 
176 



Between the Lines 

same answer that would be given to the 
query. How does the athlete get his mus- 
cle? By practice. One scowl or two will 
not make a wrinkle, but several hundred 
a year will develop an unmistakable fur- 
row within half a dozen years, or in even 
less time, in those sections of the face 
which respond to the emotions rather 
than to purely intellectual processes. 

In most cases the emotions of fear, 
hate, anger, and impatience are registered 
instantaneously in vertical lines between 
the eyebrows. These marks are almost 
invariably found in the faces of nervous 
and hysterical women who are "worried 
and troubled about many things." It 
would be safe to conclude that the Scrip- 
tural Martha had two or three vertical 
lines between her eyebrows, and perhaps 
two more that drew down the corners 
of her mouth. The same facial memo- 
randa may be seen in the modern descend- 

12 177 



Why Love Grows Cold 

ants of Martha, the women who rush 
madly toward bargain-counters or street- 
cars, wearing on their faces an anxious 
expression ludicrously out of proportion 
to its occasion. 

While lines between the brows generally 
indicate a petulant disposition, there are 
several other causes which bring them. 
Near-sighted people and artists develop 
these vertical lines by squinting; weak- 
eyed people, by blinking against the sun 
or a too strong light. Deaf people, too, 
who unconsciously wear a strained expres- 
sion in trying to hear, and, in short, 
all kinds of people who are trying to solve 
puzzling problems, fall into the habit of 
knitting the brows. The vertical wrinkle 
is also common among physicians, law- 
yers, authors, artists, and editors. 

Longitudinal lines, very frequently found 
in the faces of clergymen, orators, and 
poets, are caused by elevating the brows, 

178 



Between the Lines 

a method of noncommittal expression, 
which stands the preacher in good stead 
when he is cornered by queries that leave 
him no escape except in an expression 
which is a compromise between surprise 
and disapproval. The longitudinal wrin- 
kle is much less disfiguring than the ver- 
tical, and its origin is nearly always in- 
tellectual rather than emotional. The 
foreheads of statesmen and diplomatists 
furnish numerous illustrations of wrinkles 
of this variety. Much of the impressiveness 
of Gladstone's last portraits would be ab- 
sent without the frontal hieroglyphics 
slowly and subtly limned by Time and 
Gladstone. 

Perhaps the most interesting of all 
wrinkle-groups are those located around 
the regions where humorous dispatches 
are filed, at the corners of the eyes and 
the mouth. These are all lines which add 
to the attractiveness of the face unless 

179 



Why Love Grows Cold 

the humor recorded is of the "broad" 
brand which produces the "low smile," 
destructive to all delicacy of expression. 
Even an otherwise plain face, embellished 
by traces of duplicating dimples, and a 
few light impressionistic lines at the cor- 
ners of the eyes, is good to look upon. 
The wrinkle of humor, at the same time, 
gives a trustworthy index of character, for 

"The man who can smile 
Is the man that's worth while," 

and the lines that record plentiful smiles 
in the past are usually a certificate of 
an intelligent mind and a philosophical 
disposition, and go far toward answering 
the question, "Is he happy?" which Car- 
dinal Mazarin used to ask about a man 
before employing him. 

In addition to wrinkles of emotional 
origin there are a great many without 
direct moral significance. Illness, old age, 
and emaciation, which make the skin so 

i8o 



Between the Lines 

loose that it no longer fits the face, cause 
it to fall together in folds like a misfit 
garment. London fogs, however undesira- 
ble they may be in some respects, are un- 
doubted preservers of beauty in keeping 
the skin moist and less susceptible to 
wrinkles. Still, wrinkles in the disposi- 
tion will leave their traces even on the 
fairest face, and for these nothing but 
ethical training, which substitutes benevo- 
lent for malevolent emotions, will perma- 
nently suffice. 

When one has studied the lines on the 
faces of women who have been obliged 
for many years to elbow their way through 
the business thoroughfares of life, and the 
facial lines of those who have been spared 
such a calamity, she will perhaps admit 
that it is something more than mere hide- 
bound obstinacy and selfish or jealous 
interest which makes the most thought- 
ful men protest against the entrance of 

i8i 



Why Love Grows Cold 

women into all kinds of hardening pur- 
suits in which men engage. An in- 
stinct, of higher and wiser authority than 
themselves, speaks through men's protest 
against one phase of the modern life of 
women. It is to the everlasting credit 
of good men — and an extenuating char- 
acteristic of bad ones — that they know 
quite as often as women themselves what 
feminine qualities should be preserved. 
Among those qualities are several — not- 
ably serenity, gentleness, and courtesy — 
which belong to what the world calls a 
lady in the best sense of the word. But 
these qualities do not, as a rule, thrive 
in the strenuous atmospheres of business, 
and little by little the facial lines which 
registered the presence of such qualities 
are obliterated, and new and harder lines, 
more like those in men's faces, are written 
in their stead. There is, furthermore, a 
reflex risk that men will be deprived of 

182 



Between the Lines 

some of the finest lines in their faces — 
lines that are written by a natural instinct 
to shield and protect women. 

The result of all these tendencies is to 
destroy the pleasing difference between 
masculine and feminine expression at which 
Nature aimed, as well as her obvious 
attempt to perfect certain virtues by the 
specialism of sex. 

From these observations no one should 
infer that the feminine ideal of the writer 
is a vapid compound of sweet negations. 
The fairest of all flowers, in fiber, color, 
and fragrance, grows on a firm stalk, 
well-armed with thorns, and the fairest 
flowers of grace and courtesy blossom 
from a stalk strongly spiked with pro- 
tecting virtues. But too often the effect 
of a business life on women is to scatter 
the roses and leave behind only the thorny 
stalk. 

A photographic composite of the faces 

183 



Why Love Grows Cold 

of fifty " schoolma'am's" from the public 
schools would greatly illuminate the mat- 
ter under discussion, especially if they had 
been teachers for over two decades. 

"You haven't acquired the schoolma'am 
air, and for heaven's sake don't," said 
a clever supervisor to his young assistant. 
In the first part of the remark spoke the 
professional man, in the latter the man 
who was weighing larger human issues; 
and the resultant of them both added 
the compromising caution, "but you will 
have to find some substitute." 

The schoolma'am air leaves its mark 
in the lines about the mouth and between 
the brows. But in justice to teachers, 
it must be conceded that there are some 
who do find a substitute for the air, and 
so escape its more baleful brand. There 
are also many women who develop some 
of the lines worn by teachers, though they 
have never taught a day in their lives. 

184 



Between the Lines 

Another interesting phase of the study 
of wrinkles is found in the marked dif- 
ference which exists between the facial 
lines of different races and between different 
classes of the same race. If one puts side 
by side a photographic group of the mem- 
bers of the French Academy, and a similar 
group of forty Academizable Englishmen 
or Americans, the racial lines may be very 
easily discerned. 

Equally pronounced is the psychical ef- 
fect of religious experiences and different 
religious beliefs upon facial lines. The phys- 
iognomic penciling of a nun's face, and 
the almost blank facial document of a 
vacant-minded girl whose highest delight 
is gastronomic, also present alluring psy- 
chological data. Not less interesting is 
the comparison of the linear notes on the 
face of a priest or monk, and those of a 
Protestant clergyman. In days gone 
by, when religion was a somewhat grim 

185 



Why Love Grows Cold 

and severe dispensation, its influence as a 
modifier of facial expression was in keep- 
ing with the notions entertained about 
it. The devout burners of witches and 
damners of unbaptized infants indexed 
their beHefs in stern hard Hnes that ad- 
mirably fitted their visages to texts in 
shalt-nots, and the result was a face 
like Cotton Mather's. With latter-day 
eliminations from theological beliefs came 
a softening of the lines of the face, and the 
world has been blessed with faces like those 
of Phillips Brooks, Edward Everett Hale, 
and others less known to fame. Who 
cannot recall some silver-haired grand- 
father or grandmother whose well-written 
countenance was a table of beatitudes ? 

Many such faces, in youth, may have 
been called "homely," but every year 
has added to the facial chronicle its tale 
of love, sorrow, aspiration, strife, hero- 
ism, and victory, until the face has un- 

i86 



Between the Lines 

dergone transfiguration, silently wrought 
by the holy processes of the soul. Such 
beauty of countenance cannot be meas- 
ured by those whose highest standards 
are found in the unscored tablets of youth. 
Trusting to the latter, how many a man 
has made shipwreck on the great conjugal 
deep, because there was no guiding chart 
on the unwritten brow of his too youth- 
ful beloved! His choice has been made 
before the lookout lines of the face were 
clearly marked, or before he himself was 
skilled enough to read them, and, lo ! 
what promised to be a fig proved to be 
a thistle. 

The modern tendency to retard the age 
when men and women "give hostages to 
fortune" has been much bewailed in cer- 
tain quarters ; but there is a grain of con- 
solation in the thought that every year 
writes the facial table of contents in more 
legible letters, so that a matrimonial 

187 



Why Love Grows Cold 

venture need not be quite so much of a 
leap in the dark as in the days of our 
ancestors, when Lucy, aetat sixteen, wed- 
ded Samuel, aged twenty. 

Yet even in our more cautious age, 
one cannot trust too implicitly the records 
of every face. There is now and then a 
man or woman who has what is known 
as a "poker face," which has been rigidly 
schooled into stoical inflexibility. The 
muscles, denied their natural response 
to the thoughts and emotions, no longer 
give authentic reports, and Nature's de- 
sign of giving the mind's construction 
in the face is partially thwarted. There 
is, moreover, abroad in the land the 
woman who invokes the arts of dermatol- 
ogy, often succeeding in obliterating, to a 
considerable extent, the signal lines which 
might guide a wary suitor. Against all 
such a mild warning is interpolated, and, 
while the admonitory mood is still active, 

i88 



Between the Lines 

one is tempted to offer the would-be de- 
ceivers themselves a bit of counsel. To 
the possessor of the "poker face" let this 
little word suffice : A face which at matu- 
rity (a date that may be relatively fixed 
somewhere in the neighborhood of thirty 
to forty) reveals nothing, is, to speak 
paradoxically, a revelation either of 
emptiness or of something hidden. 

To the other class of deceivers, who 
undergo prolonged and painful treatment 
to erase a wrinkle, one feels like recom- 
mending a simple course of ethics. For 
no dermatologist can give to the counte- 
nance the charm which may be written 
into it by those higher, inner forces that 
make thought and action beautiful. 

To beauty thus acquired the years offer 
no menace, but rather promise of greater 
fulfillment, even as the tones of a violin un- 
der the hand of a master are mellowed by 
the sweet vibrations of the passing years. 

189 



NATURE'S ECONOMIES. 

The Yankee has sometimes been derided 
for his inventions which combine in a small 
compass a variety of vulgar conveniences. 
But Nature herself, in her wondrous de- 
vices for making one organ fulfill a score 
of varied and diverse functions, far out- 
distances any of man's contrivances. 

Consider for a moment what a jack- 
of-all-trades is the mouth, the conveyor 
of eatables, drinkables, the purveyor of 
eloquence, music, laughter, smiles, scorn, 
pouts, and kisses, not to mention any of 
its minor and acquired offices, as a pen- 
cil-holder for the clerk and a needle- and 
pin-receiver for the dressmaker. If so to 
consider is not to consider too curiously, 
shall we not marvel at the mechanism of 
an organ so constructed that it can 

190 



Nature's Economies 

without incongruity or loss of dignity be 
a receiver of the items of a menu or the 
wordless volapiik of lovers? For so gen- 
tly does memory efface for us the fact that 
the same mouth which is now breathing 
forth words of love and tenderness, but 
three hours since, perchance, was occu- 
pied—not less zealously — ^with the prosaic 
mastication of lobster or beef. 

Contemplating such ill-mated verities, 
one has almost a flitting wish that Na- 
ture could have foregone for once her 
usual economies in fashioning the chief 
weapon in Cupid's armory and guarded 
its use with some exclusions. But on the 
contrary, the mouth, more than most 
organs, is a great factotum ; and the lips, 
only nominally and temporarily, Cupid's 
bow, being quite otherwise engaged the 
larger share of the time in all manner of 
miscellaneous occupations, from the deliver- 
ance of eloquence to whistling or smoke. 

191 



Why Love Grows Cold 

Examples of the same economy of func- 
tion may be found throughout the human 
body, each organ having, in addition to 
its purely physical office, a varying num- 
ber of intellectual, moral, and hybrid func- 
tions. The nose, in its most vital physical 
function, is the air canal to the lungs, 
but in its higher vocations, as a discerner 
of odors pleasant and unpleasant — and the 
world of associations with which they are 
invested — it is a most proficient tutor of 
the mind and soul, the translator of the 
fragrant messages of the flower-world, 
the breath of the ocean, and the dank and 
poisonous vapors of regions polluted and 
deathly. The same nose that quietly and 
continually feeds the lungs with oxygen, 
warns us when gas is escaping, instructs 
us — ere she has spoken — concerning the 
grade of our fellow-traveler who is redo- 
lent with musk, or brings up, with a pass- 
ing whiff from a florist's window, a world 

192 



Nature's Economies 

of associations that vibrate through the 
soul like the strains the wind plays upon 
the sensitive strings of an Aeolian harp. 

In another of its artificial callings, the 
nose, as a support for eyeglasses or spec- 
tacles, holds an office so important to 
those with defective eyesight that it looks 
as if Nature had foreseen the contingency 
of failing sight and covenanted with the 
nose to be conveniently near and ready 
to receive the artificial aids which man 
would be sure to contrive. Again, the 
nose, as a great physiognomic elevation in 
the facial lowlands, has a passively artistic 
function similar to that of a mountain- 
peak, which relieves the monotony of dead 
levels. A face without a nose would be 
a face that one would scarcely care to 
contemplate. 

And lastly, in its various sizes and con- 
tours, the nose is a valuable index of 
disposition and character. 
13 193 



Why Love Grows Cold 

But of all Nature's organic illustrations 
of the economy of versatility, the most 
marvelous is undoubtedly the hand. For 
who could enumerate the myriad tasks 
which it performs, from the servile toil 
of the street-cleaner to the delicate chisel- 
ing of the sculptor, or the silent eloquence 
of its own mechanism, hinting questions 
to which no sage has yet found an answer ? 
Without the hand, where were all the 
worlds of literature, music, art, or prac- 
tical Christianity? Studying the infinite 
possibilities that grow out of its flexi- 
bility, is it not reasonable to conceive 
that the Intelligence which created an 
instrument of such miraculous adjust- 
ability, strength, and suppleness as the 
hand foresaw its ecstatic movements over 
the strings of a violin or a piano, or the 
finger-fine obedience to the vast range 
of emotions that have been transcribed 
in painting, sculpture, and architecture? 

194 



Nature's Economies 

One can scarcely avoid the surmise, 
moreover, that in the design of the hand 
there was not only a divine prevision of 
all the things which it has thus far accom- 
plished, but a still more wonderful world 
of results to be achieved by the increas- 
ingly dexterous hands of generations yet 
to be. 

In spite of all its duties as a body-serv- 
ant, the hand never loses the dignity 
which attaches to its esthetic or moral 
functions (as a peacemaker or an instru- 
ment of vengeance). For what volumi- 
nous expressions of friendship, affection, 
or forgiveness may be condensed in a 
cordial hand-clasp, and what defiance in 
a clenched fist or warning finger! 

But to review all that the hand can 
accomplish would be to review most of the 
products of the material world, and one 
casts about for some other organ not 
so overloaded with offices — the heart, per- 

195 



Why Love Grows Cold 

haps. But, no; on second thoughts, even 
the heart, in its secret chamber— tirelessly- 
beating off our life-ticks, is not exempt 
from the multifarious roles imposed by- 
Nature. And, alas ! the pity of it ! For 
if it could pump blood alone, how few 
cases of heart-failure would be on record ! 
But in addition to this perpetual physical 
employment, loving, hating, joying, griev- 
ing, fearing, pitying, envying, and de- 
sponding are on its list of moral and im- 
moral functions. Rare, indeed, is the heart 
that does not let some of these occupations 
interfere with the proper performance of 
its first simple duty as a blood-pump. 
, In a harsh world, where one must draw 
his breath in pain, the man or woman 
past thirty whose heart still pulls a steady, 
full stroke has either a very strong physi- 
cal organ and somewhat obtuse sensibili- 
ties, or he is a philosopher who has 
schooled himself and instructed his feel- 

196 



Nature's Economies 

ings to be "out" when painful calls are 
made upon them. 

But for many this schooling itself taxes 
the strength of the heart one would keep 
unimpaired. The soundest heart, phys- 
ically considered, will be found in the 
man or woman who is "dead to rapture 
or despair," in the man who never reads 
a book, and in the woman who can sleep 
nine hours without a break. 

When one faces the fact that every in- 
crease of refinement and delicacy of feeling 
means a corresponding increase in the 
capacity for suffering, it looks as though 
the heart would become in our great- 
great-grandchildren a deranged organ, 
ticking faintly and wearily like far-off 
echoes of the robust throbs of a less re- 
fined and civilized era. But with this 
doleful speculation comes another more 
comforting. Modern psychology, with its 
keenly introspective eye, has already ex- 

197 



Why Love Grows Cold 

plored the regions of the emotions and 
their effects, so that we may expect, in due 
time, scientists and inventors who will 
discover for every involuntary emotion 
that pulls the heart-strings another volun- 
tary one with a counter-pull, so that one 
may learn to love, hate, fear, and pity so 
scientifically that the heart will not suffer 
in consequence, but keep its perfect rhythm 
without the loss of one small fraction of 
a beat. 

May these things be, and yet we venture 
to hope that they may be without elimi- 
nating the human element in pity and re- 
ducing it to a mechanical impulse as cold 
and impersonal as a charity soup-ticket. 



198 



WHAT'S IN AN EYE. 

Physiologically considered, the eye is 
a small magical ball, filled with aqueous 
and vitreous humors, furnished with a 
crystalline lens, a perforated curtain for 
regulating the admission of light, and 
three protecting coats. By means of this 
mysterious outfit, the eye delivers to man 
the countless messages of earth and sky, 
from the sublimest utterance of mountain 
and star to the most trivial common- 
place that speaks from a button. 

But in addition to its capacity as a 
receiver and reporter of impressions from 
without, the eye is no less marvelous as 
a reporter of the world within — being, 
indeed, a directory of all the great men- 
tal and moral thoroughfares, crooked 
streets and dark alleys, in the unbounded 

199 



Whv Love Grow-s Cold 

city of man. All visible wonders of the 
human mechanism find their culmination 
in the e^e. For here matter almost seems 
to lose its stolid thingness and reach the 
fine di\*iding line, the delicate transition 
point, where it half merges into spirit, 
CKer the sensitive films and fibers of the 
eye the soul transmits messages too deli- 
cate for the cruder and less adequate re- 
sources of speech. All that the quivering, 
\'ibratin£: strinsrs of the violin can tell 
the ear, the e}e tells another eye \\'ith 
its vast chromatic scale of changing 
lights and shado\\"s, t^\*inkling dilations 
and contractions. \Miere the tongiie is 
slow and does its bidding but falteringly, 
the eye, ^^'ith one sN^ft glance, amends 
the stammering speech or atones for its 
omission altogether. With the eye man 
discerns and is discerned. 

As a discoverer and discloser of secrets, 
the eye occupies the position of pri\y- 

200 



What's in an Eye 

council to the understanding, or foster- 
parent to the eye of faith and the "inner 
eye, which is the bhss of solitude." The 
outer eye reads the lines to the inner eye, 
which reads between them. Such is the 
double vision of the wise man, whose 
eyes — on the authority of Solomon — "are 
in his head." 

Confronting the world, the eye is a wary 
scout ; in the lover it is both plaintiff and 
advocate; in the maiden it is the "watch- 
ful sentinel, who charms the more its 
glance forbids"; in the jester it is the 
herald of wit; and in the mourner, the 
mute translator of grief. 

The eye is the only linguist whose vola- 
piik may hope to survive the change and 
decay that await all other languages. 
But the eye is also a polyglot, since by 
means of its diversity of coloring it may 
be said to have four distinct languages — 
Black, Brown, Blue, and Gray — besides a 

201 



Why Love Grows Cold 

great many more or less picturesque di- 
alects in hazel-green, mottled gray, and 
other compounds of the colors already 
mentioned. 

The language of the black eye is gen- 
erally less intelligible than that of the 
brown or blue, and bespeaks a nature 
less open and sympathetic. As a matter 
of fact, black eyes are very rare, and 
many that pass for black are, in reality, 
only very dark brown that at times look 
black when the pupils are much dilated. 
The language of the brown eye in all 
its shades is better known. As a rule, 
very good qualities of mind and heart go 
with brown eyes, though one must make 
an exception in the case of protruding, 
beady eyes (destitute of mirth), which 
belong to people of a very prosaic type of 
mind. But one may almost always count 
upon the humor and open-mindedness 
of a man or woman with soft brown eyes, 

202 



What's in an Eye 

capable of a vast range of expression, 
from the merriest of innocent twinkles 
to the deep, shadowy reflections of gloom 
and despair. The large brown eye is par 
excellence the repository of passion and 
melancholy. No eye of any other color 
seems capable of expressing such fathom- 
less grief, anger, and reproach, or, under 
the stimulus of an evil impulse, such a 
suggestion of diabolic obsession, as a 
dark brown eye. A blue-eyed man may 
be as sad or bad as another one with 
dark brown eyes ; but sadness or badness, 
written in the blue of ocular rhetoric, 
loses visible intensity, possibly for the 
same reason that the devil — albeit the 
same dread potentate — would be less 
diabolically impressive and expressive if 
dressed in blue instead of his customary 
suit of inky black. Using a brown pig- 
ment, Nature frequently tricks the un- 
discerning, nevertheless, by underscoring 

203 



Why Love Grows Cold 

— ^with the effect of italics — ^various ex- 
pressions of the eye, but by no means 
guaranteeing a superior intensity of the 
emotion back of the expression. "My 
cousin Phil labors at a great disadvan- 
tage," said a bright young woman, "be- 
cause his eyes are not brown. In the 
medical profession they would double his 
practice, for he wouldn't need to be sym- 
pathetic; he could just roll his eyes effec- 
tively, now and then, and he would be 
adjudged the very milk of mercy and ten- 
derness, which he really is, though his 
eyes conceal rather than proclaim the 
fact." 

A common variety of the brown eye 
is of a light butternut color and almost 
as devoid of expression as a bright shin- 
ing button, furnishing, indeed, a truth- 
ful index to the blank pages behind it. 
Such an eye is chiefly a physical organ 
useful in directing the way to dinner. 

204 



What's in an Eye 

Nearly the same characteristics that ac- 
company the shining-button eye are found 
in men and women with crockery-blue 
eyes, that keep an unvarying and monot- 
onous blueness and brightness, unrespon- 
sive to any psychical influences that often 
give beauty or interest to eyes dull in 
color and faulty in shape. 

In its rarest and finest shades, the blue 
eye generally accompanies delicacy of taste 
and an affectionate disposition, though 
exceptions have been known where eyes 
like the blue dreams of Cloud-land have 
belonged to young women with disposi- 
tions closely related to "Shere Khan's," 
of Jungle fame. Perhaps the best eyes 
of this color are the deep, burning blue, 
the violet blue, and a very pale blue which 
seems to reflect ethereal lights that illu- 
mine the whole face. Something, possibly, 
in its color kinship to the sky, and the 
whole world of blue-eyed blossoms, or in 

205 



Why Love Grows Cold 

its darker shades, its power as a minia- 
ture reminder of the deeps of the ocean, 
gives the blue eye a language as different 
from that of the brown or black as the 
effects which an artist produces by the 
use of blue and brown pigments. In Emer- 
son's "Ode to Eva" one finds a dainty 
illustration of the skyward suggestions of 
the blue eye : 

" fair and stately maid, whose eyes 
Were kindled in the upper skies." 

But comparatively few poets have cele- 
brated the charms of the gray-blue eye, 
which has guided so many a conqueror 
to victory and fame. With eyes of this 
hue one finds almost invariably a clear, 
logical brain, a temper of considerable 
volcanic activity, and an imperious dis- 
position. 

When all has been said — ^which has not 
been attempted here — concerning the sig- 
nificance of the color of the eye, one has 

206 



What*s in an Eye 

only begun to consider the catalogue of 
the rhetorical possibilities of the eye. A 
large percentage, indeed, of descriptive 
adjectives applied to eyes refer wholly 
to their expression, irrespective of their 
color. Cold, cruel, mocking, furtive, rest- 
less, secretive, inscrutable, uncertain, dead, 
dull, dreamy, slumbrous, honest, piercing, 
snapping, sparkling, twinkling, merry, 
sad, melancholy, bird-like, fish-like, hawk- 
like, gazelle-like, cow-like, and dog-like 
are all adjectives vastly more definite and 
significant than those which relate to 
color merely. To say that an eye is 
black or brown gives about the same 
amount of information that is conveyed 
by the statement that a story is written 
in English. But when it is said that a 
woman has a snaky eye, the description 
is clear and calls up an accurate vision of 
a small, shiny eye, black or very dark 
brown in color, in whose darting, side- 

207 



Why Love Grows Cold 

wise glance there is often a semblance of 
red or green fire. Again in the adjective 
fishy or fish-like, applied to eyes, one sees 
an instantaneous picture of a round, 
protruding eye, usually of a cold, gray- 
ish color, that belongs to an untrust- 
worthy character, a man of disorderly 
mind, abnormal instincts, and a crawly 
kind of magnetism. 

The study of the transfixing, magnetic, 
or psychic eye, as it is sometimes called, 
takes one into the crepuscular realm of 
morbid psychology, where things not 
dreamed of in the philosophy of the skep- 
tical are possible. For base or noble ends 
the transfixing eye is a powerful psychical 
weapon. When a good man or woman 
has such an eye, he can send from it one 
penetrating, discomfiting glance, beneath 
which the dishonest and knavish man 
will wince and cringe like a whipped cur, 
while all that is open and upright in an- 

208 



What's in an Eye 

other man is challenged to come forth 
and defy the deepest scrutiny. 

To meet daily the probing of a fearless, 
honest eye is a moral discipline and stimu- 
lus whose value the educational world may 
some time take into account more than 
it now does. Henry Drummond's eyes 
possessed the strong psychic quality under 
consideration. " His eye," writes Dr. Wat- 
son, "was not bold or fierce, . . . but it 
had a power and hold which were little else 
than irresistible and almost supernatural. 
When you talked with Drummond, he did 
not look at you and out of the window 
alternately, as is the usual manner; he 
never moved his eyes, and gradually their 
penetrating gaze seemed to reach and 
encompass your soul. It was as Plato 
imagined it would be in the judgment : one 
soul was in contact with another — noth- 
ing between. No man could be double or 
base or mean or impure before that eye." 
14 209 



Why Love Grows Cold 

A lower order of the psychic eye is com- 
mon among hypnotists who do not exert 
their power for strictly moral ends. The 
worst type of the psychic eye is popularly 
known as the "evil eye," much of whose 
power is apocryphally magnified by the 
superstitious. Still there can be little 
doubt that evil people have evil eyes. 
One may scarcely go through the voyage 
of life without encountering such eyes, 
from whose glances any decent man or 
woman naturally shrinks as from a pesti- 
lential breath. For the life he has lived 
is epitomized in the expression of a man's 
eye. And most marvelous it is, when 
one stops to think about it, that on a 
small space which may be covered with 
a penny, can be written the passing and 
permanent records of a man's soul. Be- 
sides the registration in the eye of the 
transient moods of love, hate, anger, 
fear, envy, jealousy, mirth, or melan- 

210 



What's in an Eye 

choly, there is the composite effect of all 
these emotions, that gives the eye its 
predominant expression. Not a high or 
holy impulse comes to man, or a base, 
unworthy motive, that is not subtly re- 
flected in the magical mirror of the eye. 

Out of the memories of the past comes 
one of a face made luminous by eyes 
whose rapt expression told a plain tale. 
Their owner was a lonely cripple who had 
learned to pray. A light that comes from 
no other source than prayer lit up her 
eyes and gave them a beauty which the 
painters of saints have so often vainly 
striven to catch. In painful contrast to 
this face, memory holds another, whose 
eyes were of the same color and shape 
as those of the little cripple; but as a 
child the latter had been reared in a 
notably pernicious social circle, whose 
pettiness, frivolity, and deceit gradually 
left their damaging increments in her 

211 



Why Love Grows Cold 

eyes. From such painful records one turns 
with a sense of reHef to the wholesome 
admonitions which may be read in the 
honest eyes of dumb animals, that have 
nothing to hide. The child sets out in 
life with eyes as free from reflections of de- 
ceit or duplicity as are the eyes of a ga- 
zelle or a spaniel : 

"There is no truth in faces save in children. 
They laugh and weep from Nature's keys." 

The spaniel and gazelle always keep the 
same clear eye, but how is it with the 
child ? Where is that fine limpidity through 
which one once could look into the very 
heaven of innocence? Any mother who 
has made a collection of photographs 
of her child, taken yearly or more fre- 
quently, may place them side by side in 
chronological order, and trace the effects — 
if she has the courage — of the gradual 
alloying which life works in the once un- 
clouded light of childish eyes. With every 

212 



What's in an Eye 

passing month, something goes almost 
imperceptibly from the eyes, and some- 
thing else as imperceptibly takes its 
place; and in the difference between these 
continual gains and losses is recorded 
the mental and moral ascent or descent 
of the child. 

Some men and women manage to re- 
tain in their eyes, through all the dis- 
illusionizing experiences of life, a steady 
beam of the same clear ray that dawned 
in cradlehood. In the average man and 
woman of the world, however, there is 
but a faint flicker of this primitive light, 
which must be vestal-trimmed and guarded 
to keep it from being extinguished. In 
the eyes of an elderly hermit, with whom 
the writer once had the pleasure of a 
conversation, the unquenched lights of 
childish honesty were distinctly visible. 
Pondering over the cause of this phenom- 
enon, it became clear that in the hermit's 

213 



Why Love Grows Cold 

long and almost exclusive association 
with nature, his dog, and cat, he had 
but little more opportunity or occasion 
for any dissimulation in word or expression 
than his dog, and, in consequence, his 
eyes were as honest as those of his four- 
footed colleagues. 

From this deduction it was a safe and 
easy step to another; namely, that the 
influence of a good dog or cat might 
be more salutary to a man in some ways 
than promiscuous association with those 
of his own kind. Looking into the frank 
eyes of his dog, a man rises to the dog's 
level of honesty and meets the animal's 
glance with one as honest as his own. 

It would be comforting to know that 
a day will come when the glances of men 
and women will be as honest as those 
of the lower animals. But at present 
the "heavenly rhetoric of the eye" is often 
equivocal, and Nature herself has a hand 

214 



What's in an Eye 

in creating the ambiguity; for she some- 
times gives a saintHke face and large 
soulful eyes to a young woman utterly 
devoid of sensibility and appreciation of 
the higher issues of life; while to another 
young woman, with a luminous soul, she 
will give achromatic eyes of the most 
nondescript character. Hence it comes 
to pass that 

' ' Those eyes — the break of day, 
Lights that do mislead the morn," 

do not stop with that innocent offense. 
These cases, however, are exceptions, which 
always occur to bring to naught the wis- 
dom of fools and to establish the errancy 
of the wise. 



215 



THE DEVIL'S FANCY-WORK. 

It is an unpleasant fact that lies have 
an unquestionably ancient origin, coming 
in, indeed, with the adoption of clothes, 
and being themselves a kind of extem- 
porized garment to cover the nakedness 
of the soul detected in sin. 

Let memory call the roll of Scriptual 
celebrities, and echoing down the ages 
come the lies of Rachel, Jacob, Sarah, 
Abraham, Samson, Saul, David, and many 
others, till we come to Ananias and Sap- 
phira, who were pre-eminently unfortunate 
in being allowed to appear on the Bibli- 
cal stage in only one ignominious scene. 

The opinion seems to be current that 
one race differeth from another in the 
ability to speak the truth. In ancient 
times the Cretans were badly eminent in 

216 



The Devil's Fancy-Work 

prevaricating accomplishments. Accord- 
ing to the Apostle Paul, Epimenides de- 
clared the Cretans were always liars; 
but, as Epimenides himself was a Cretan, 
we are not sure of our evidence. The 
Turks, on the other hand, are obliged 
to use the circumlocution, "You tell that 
which is not," so rare is the practice of 
lying among them. This evidence, again, 
being circumstantial, may be ruled out; 
yet the same kind of evidence makes one 
wonder if it is not true that races, whose 
languages have undergone so much for 
euphony's sake (witness the Greek, Italian, 
French, and Spanish), have not a greater 
tendency to syncopate and elide cacopho- 
nous verities than have the firm Teu- 
tonic chewers of consonants. This may 
be only a fancy, but it does not seem un- 
reasonable to suppose that a people whose 
ears are so fastidious in matters of eu- 
phony should attempt to soften the some- 

217 



Why Love Grows Cold 

times rugged aspirates of truth. Be that 
as it may, we see the less radical effects 
of this tendency in the euphemisms which 
these races employ. Even a man of such 
reputed integrity as Solon called his sys- 
tem of lightening debts by lightening 
coins a^Seisachtheia," or disincumbrance ; 
so it should occasion no surprise that the 
common Athenians spoke of tributes as 
"customs," jails as "chambers," and gar- 
risons as "guards." 

Tacitus complains of a similar practice 
of using misleading speech among the 
Romans. "They make a desert and call 
it peace," is his statement of the matter — 
an evasive tournure which finds many 
parallels in the crafty vocabulary which 
we have constructed since our "occupa- 
tion" of the Philippine Islands. In fu- 
ture years some philologist or moralist 
will find a rich field in the study of the 
rhetorical masks manufactured by impe,- 

218 



The DeviFs Fancy- Work 

rialism. Witness a partial list of our 
achievements in this line : 

Imperialism, Expansion, Absorption, 
Pacification, Benevolent Assimilation, 
Annexation, Colonization, Paternalism, 
Extension of Territory, Extending the 
Benefits of Civilization, Industrial Su- 
premacy, Dominance of the Anglo-Saxon 
Race, Providential Leading, Exploita- 
tion of the Islands of the Pacific, Finding 
a New Field for American Capital, Orien- 
tal Development, Quelling the Insurrection, 
Development of the Islands, Becoming a 
World-Power, Preparing the Filipinos for 
Self-Government, Plain Duty, Hand of 
Destiny, Finger of Fate, Spreading the 
Gospel, Letting the Flag Stay Put, Sup- 
porting the Administration. 

Let the reader test each of these sound- 
ing polysyllables, first by his ear and 
then by his moral sense and the sober 
unadorned facts of the case. To the 

219 



Why Love Grows Cold 

ear, expansion and absorption sound like 
pretty pastimes, as innocuous as the 
blowing of soap-bubbles. In reality, they 
cover a stupendous crime — the slaughter 
of uncounted thousands of innocent men 
and children, and the devastation of their 
country and homes. 

In the same manner, Caesar delicately 
submerged unpleasant details of his cam- 
paigns, describing the condition of the 
peoples whose homes had been sacked 
and burned, with soft brevity, "pax 
pacata." Roman veracity is further illu- 
minated by several sinister proverbs, like : 
''Quid Romae faciamf mentire nescio^'' and 
" Veritas odium parity 

The Romans, however, could hardly bear 
away the palm from the Greeks in men- 
dacious exploits. The reputation of the 
much-bepraised hero, the "godlike Ulys- 
ses," was founded largely on his skill in 
issuing negotiable lies. This habit was so 

220 



The Devil's Fancy-Work 

much a second nature with him that even 
when he had at last reached his native 
land, and might have reined in his im- 
agination for a rest, he regales his old 
friend, Pallas, with a tale worthy of 
Baron Munchausen. Even the blue-eyed 
goddess, familiar as she is with his profi- 
ciency in this line, is astounded, and re- 
vealing herself to him declares : 

" Full shrewd were he a master of deceit 
Who should surpass thee in the ways of craft, 
Even though he were a god; thou, unabashed 
And prompt with shifts and measureless in wiles, 
Thou canst not even in thine own land refrain 
From artful figments and misleading words 
As thou hast practiced from thy birth." 

Not a hint of reproof, however, comes 
from Minerva. On the contrary, she 
touches her favorite caressingly, and seems 
to take great pride in his genius for ex- 
temporizing. The Greek gods, indeed, 
could lay claim to no moral superiority, 
save in the ingenuity with which they 
out-Greeked their creators in misleading 

221 



Why Love Grows Cold 

men and hoodwinking each other. Juno, 
especially, was a liar of infinite resource, 
hoaxing her omnipotent consort so often 
that one comes to the conclusion that, 
despite his omniscience, Zeus was a hen- 
pecked divinity of the most gullible order. 
Among modern nations, the English 
and Germans have enviable reputations 
for sincerity. What the standing of Ameri- 
cans is in this regard is a very open ques- 
tion. The untrammeled imagination of 
the Westerner, keeping pace with the 
growth of his country, has given a some- 
what florid cast to the tales which origi- 
nate in his vicinity. But, as most of these 
stories are told with no intent to deceive, 
they can hardly be called lies. Along- 
side of such habits of romance, more- 
over, one finds instances of beautifully 
laconic candor, like the explanation, 
"Busted," published in the last issue of 
a Western newspaper, and the announce- 

222 



The Devil's Fancy- Work 

merit by a Western clergyman that "in- 
compatibility" was the cause of his resig- 
nation. 

In every country there are local varia- 
tions from the national type; but, until 
the contrary is proved, one may accept 
as a provisional solace the hypothesis 
that there are as many truthful Ameri- 
cans — in proportion to their number — 
as Britons. A nation, whose best-loved 
leaders have been men like Honest Abe 
and the hero of the hachet, shows an 
appreciation and respect for sincerity 
which argue like qualities among its citi- 
zens. In the testimony of her literary 
representatives on this subject, America 
has been most happy. In nearly every 
one of Emerson's essays one finds some 
note in the following key : " I look upon 
the simple and childish virtues of veracity 
and honesty as the root of all that is 
sublime in character." Equally strong 

223 



Why Love Grows Cold 

and more bizarre in his championship 
of truthfulness was Thoreau, who would 
frankly say to the bore who attemped 
to waste his time, "I don't know, per- 
haps a minute would do for both of us." 

Of Hawthorne one of his biographers 
wrote : " The traits of his character were 
stern probity and truthfulness." This 
one might read between the lines of the 
concluding warning of "The Scarlet Let- 
ter" : "Be true, be true, be true. Show 
freely to the world, if not your worst, yet 
some trait whereby the worst may be in- 
ferred." A large share of Lowell's work, too, 
was a persistent warfare against shams in 
religion and politics, and the same is true 
of the writings of Holmes and Whittier. 

In making a relative estimate of the hon- 
esty of Americans and Britons, one must 
take into account the heterogeneous char- 
acter of our population. At the present 
hour there are several very favorable 

224 



The Devil's Fancy-Work 

signs of a growing regard for truth among 
us. One is the increasing tendency of 
both pulpit and pews to satisfy the dic- 
tates of conscience, even at the expense of 
persecution, "unconvinced by ax or gib- 
bet that all virtue is the past's." 

Returning to the consideration of Ger- 
man veracity, we see in their systems 
of education and in their manufactures 
very trustworthy signs of the genuine- 
ness of their character. A nation that 
so steadfastly insists on griindlich work, 
must possess a great deal of that griind- 
lich quality — sincerity. What is called 
their " Freethinking" is but another to- 
ken of their determination to confess be- 
lief only in what they really do believe. 

It is not the main purpose of this paper, 
however, to prove the ethical superiority 
of one nation over another, even were 
such a feat possible, but rather to show 
the cancerous effect of lying on character. 
IS 225 



Why Love Grows Cold 

Every lie told puts another mortgage 
one one's future ability to tell the truth. 
The so-called white lie is the mother of 
gray lies, and finally the grandmother 
of black ones. How many scores of such 
lies as this are heard : 

"Sue, the braid is ripped off your dress." 

Sue (who is shiftless, but does not wish 
to be thought so): "Is it? Dear me! 
When could I have done it?" 

Poor Sue, why didn't you do the heroic 
thing and face Jemima Busybody with 
the frank confession: "Yes, I know it; 
it has been so for more than a week, 
but most of my mending is done by the 
fools' calendar"? 

Again, some dear, procrastinating dam- 
sel allows her letter to contain that thread- 
bare fib, "I haven't had time" — a musty 
phrase, long ago condemned by Marcus 
Aurelius, who said he learned from Alex- 
ander the Platonic to avoid its use. 

226 



The Devil's Fancy- Work 

And yet, once more, how many an op- 
portunity for veracious hardihood is fool- 
ishly thrown away by the man who fences 
with another who has asked him if he has 
read a certain book. O fearful-hearted 
man ! If you have not read the book, 
still look your tormentor unflinchingly 
in the eye and calmly avow the fact, 
e'en though the book in question may be 
in the four thousandth whirl of a cyclone 
edition. 

By daily practice in telling the truth 
about little matters, the habit will become 
so fixed that when one is confronted with 
a great temptation to lie he will yet, by 
acquired moral velocity, move along the 
right path. 

It is chiefly among society women that 
the white lie flourishes in all its tropical 
luxuriance. There it is that lying is done 
"in an ornamental way, finished, evasive, 
and neat." Howells is never tired of turn- 

227 



Why Love Grows Cold 

ing the light, or phonograph, on this 
species of insincerity. In his farces "The 
Unexpected Guests" and "The Mouse- 
Trap" he makes some very keen and 
merited criticisms on this point. He seems 
to hold the opinion, and I think justly, 
that women are much more given to su- 
pererogatory fibbing than are men. In 
"April Hopes" his hero asks if "the most 
circuitous kind of a fellow would not be 
pretty direct compared with the straight- 
forwardest kind of a girl?" But Howells 
does not fail to expose the same failing 
when he finds it in men. 

It must be admitted that there are occa- 
sions when the temptation to dull the edge 
of too-cutting truths is well-nigh irresisti- 
ble. There are critical moments when kind 
consideration for the feelings of another 
plead for mercy at the expense of sincerity, 
and, unlike the former quality, truth is 
strained. On the record of such lies it 

228 



The Devil's Fancy-Work 

is to be hoped that the recording angel 
will drop the traditional tear — if he still 
has any in stock. In the following case 
does one not feel a throb of sympathy 
and a hope of painless expiation for the 
clever culprit ? 

The Reverend Clericus has been wait- 
ing half an hour to speak with his wife, 
who is having a call from Mrs. Longwind. 
Hearing the front door close, he supposes 
the visitor is gone. 

The Reverend C. (calling from his study) : 
"Well, has that old bore gone at last?" 

Mrs. Clericus (from the drawing-room, 
where Mrs. Longwind still sits) : "Oh, yes, 
my dear; she went an hour ago; but our 
dear Mrs. Longwind is here. I know 
you will want to come in and see her." 

This case is so full of extenuating cir- 
cumstances that a final decision must be 
left to casuists. In the first place, Mrs. 
Clericus had but a second in which to bal- 

229 



Why Love Grows Cold 

ance the claims of candor and courtesy, 
and while she is adjusting this delicate 
scale she sees in a mental flashlight the 
grieved and indignant Mrs. Longwind, 
unpleasant gossip, a compulsory resigna- 
tion, and perhaps a nomadic condition 
confronting her family. Given a woman 
with her mental velocity, with the same 
high pressure of circumstances, and one 
can see how free moral agency can be re- 
duced to a minimum so low that it shades 
into fatalism. The aberration of Mrs. 
Clericus furnishes a good illustration of 
the unpremeditated lie which differs world- 
wide from the lie prepense. 

Another very common kind of lie might 
be called the ex poste facto fib. Some one 
asks Mrs. Shortmemory why she did or 
did not do some particular thing. In- 
stead of stating the real reason, Mrs. S. 
offers a plausible one, which at that mo- 
ment occurs to her as the most acceptable 

230 



The Devil's Fancy- Work 

to her questioner. Within a few minutes 
she gives an object-lesson on an old adage 
about a rope, by offering three or four 
other reasons which invalidate the first 
one given. People, with reasons "plenty 
as blackberries/' should emulate Falstaff, 
and not give any. 

The question "why" is a particularly 
difficult one to answer truthfully, even 
for honest men. While their answers may 
not be lies, according to the dictionary, 
they will often be far from the truth; 
for though a very ignorant man can keep 
from lying, it sometimes requires more 
than honesty to speak the truth. An in- 
teresting illustration of this fact was fur- 
nished by a series of articles, written some 
time ago by prominent clergymen in an- 
swer to the query, "Why I am what I 
am." I may be mistaken, but I think 
that only four out of the fourteen who 
answered the question gave the real rea- 

231 



Why Love Grows Cold 

sons for their denominational views, most 
of them altogether ignoring the fact that 
they would have been as good Brahmins 
as they are Christians, had they been 
born near enough to the Ganges. Among 
those who weighed their reasons most 
carefully was Dr. Lyman Abbott, whose 
answer was, "Probably chiefly because I 
am an American — I was born and bred 



so." 



A similar response was made by the 
Rev. John White Chad wick : "As a matter 
of fact, it is very possible that I am a 
Unitarian because I was to the Uni- 
tarian manner born and reared." The 
Rev. G. F. Krotel makes the same ad- 
mission, and Dr. Gustav Gottheil put the 
matter in his usual logical style: "I am 
what I am because I was born so. Had 
my parents been Christians, I might have 
despised the Jews, while now I gladly 
own myself one of them. We receive our 

232 



The Devil's Fancy-Work 

religion, like out speech and manners, 
by education, of which it has been truly 
said that it begins even before our birth. 
We speak, indeed, as though we had been 
to a bazar where all the religions of the 
world are on exhibition, and, after test- 
ing all, had picked out the best. We have 
no right to put on such airs." 

Another kind of false speaking is very 
prevalent among literary critics, who feel 
an enthusiasm which nothing but fearful 
superlatives will allay. In an article on 
Walt Whitman, in a well-known magazine, 
I found this sentence : " Walt Whitman 
is of imagination all compact ; no one ever 
lived who was more so." Comment is 
unnecessary; it seems that the writer of 
that criticism knew everybody that ever 
lived. 

We find even so delightful an essayist 
as Whipple falling into the same error. 
Speaking of Shakespere's plays on the 

233 



Why Love Grows Cold 

stage, Emerson said, "One golden word 
leaps out immortal from all this painted 
pedantry, and secretly torments us with 
invitations to its own inaccessable homes." 
One may like the phraseology, until Whip- 
ple calls it " the best prose sentence written 
on this side of the Atlantic." And again 
we sigh when Hudson declares, of Words- 
worth's "Ode to Duty," that "no higher 
strain of moral inspiration has been 
breathed on earth since the days of the 
Apostles," which, of course, justifies one 
in concluding that, of all the strains 
breathed on earth since the days of the 
Apostles, not one escaped Mr. Hudson's 
ear. Even if one could believe this impos- 
sibility, it comes hard to believe that 
any one is the possessor of a spiritual 
hypsometer which is so infallible. 

The man addicted to the superlative 
habit should paste upon his inkstand 
the aphorism of Manley Pike : "No un- 

234 



The Devil's Fancy- Work 

qualified assertion is ever wholly true, 
not even this one." 

Thus, in every walk and calling of life, 
falsehood lies in wait to trip up the truth. 
The minister, in his trying calling of all 
things to all men, is peculiarly tempted 
to use reversible speech. Nietzsche, in- 
deed, declares that what a theologian 
feels is true must be false. The doctor, 
as a therapeutic means, speaks that which 
is not. The starving lawyer argues inno- 
cence for a client whom he knows to be 
guilty. The politician 

The critic sacrifices facts to rhetorical 
finish, and the teacher evades a question 
by telling his pupil to " look it up for the 
next time," thereby thinking to seem 
wiser than he is, when a frank "I don't 
know" would raise him infinitely higher 
in the estimation of sensible pupils than 
his pretended omniscience. The pupil 
cribs his cuffs and book-margins, the am- 

235 



Why Love Grows Cold 

phibious boy avoids punishment by a lie, 
and the child who has not yet learned 
to talk uses its infant crescendo to deceive 
a doting mamma. 

Nor does deception end with man and 
the world of his making. We find that 
dear old Nature herself is a Circe full of 
tricksy wiles. With an ignis fatuus she 
lures the belated traveler into bogs and 
swamps, or hangs a mirage of delight 
before him in the trackless desert. She 
makes a poisonous imitation of the mush- 
room and the ivy, and tricks the ingenu- 
ous gold-hunter with iron pyrites. 

On the other hand, Nature shows her 
disapproval of dishonesty in a thousand 
ways. While the liar's attention is given 
to his words, every deviation from the 
truth Nature debits on his face in her 
own symbols and abbreviations which 
cannot escape the skillful observer. Invol- 
untary facial expressions always speak 

236 



The DeviFs Fancy- Work 

the truth, and voluntary ones always 
lie. Mirrored in the eye is the conflict 
between voluntary and involuntary ex- 
pressions, and the same story is told by 
the oblique and roving glance, drooping 
lids, and twitching muscles about the cor- 
ners of the mouth. With all these signs 
Nature makes a detective sketch and posts 
it, like an April-fool placard, on the cul- 
prit's own person. 

With every added ofl'ense, she draws the 
lines of her sketch a little deeper, until 
the liar stands revealed, and may be read 
and known of all men. 

A wonderful picture of the facial eff"ect 
of lying is given in one of James's stories, 
"The Liar," and Caravaggio brings out 
the same idea in his grewsome painting, 
"The False Players." 

In conclusion, one naturally asks, what 
can be done about it? 

The first opportunity lies with parents 
237 



Why Love Grows Cold 

and teachers. Undoubtedly, some chil- 
dren are born with a stronger penchant 
toward veracity than are others. Never- 
theless, with proper training, most chil- 
dren can be taught to speak the truth, 
for lying is subject to the general laws 
of habit, and " use can almost change the 
stamp of Nature, and either curb the devil 
or throw him out with wondrous potency." 
If parents could implant in the minds 
of their children a loathing for the cow- 
ardice which almost always inspires a lie, 
a large part of the world's crimes would 
be prevented, and the positive gains in 
righteousness would be increased beyond 
the limits of ethical computation. But all 
attempts to incite such a loathing by pre- 
cept alone are worse than useless. Sooner 
or later every intelligent child measures 
the discrepancies between the words and 
acts of his parents, and on those discrep- 
ancies, as a rule, he will model his own. 

238 



THE LIFTING OF VEILS IN LITER- 
ATURE. 

In the elder and comparatively guileless 
days of art, ere the beginning of the bold 
and morbid dynasty from Zola to Pierre 
Louys, literature was divided into two 
great classes — the literature of knowledge 
and the literature of power. But for our 
own sophisticated generation there needs 
to be a new and safer classification : 
literature that can be read on the front 
veranda, and literature which cannot be 
read there and should not be read any- 
where; or "books that no girl would 
like to see her mother reading," and books 
that may safely be put in the hands of 
our grandfathers. 

If we may trust the reviewers and a 
few sample pages of books we are content 

239 



Why Love Grows Cold 

to read by proxy, too much of modern 
book-craft is a dire fulfillment of the 
prophecy, "For there is nothing covered 
that shall not be revealed ; neither hid that 
shall not be known ; . . . and that which 
ye have spoken in the ear in closets shall 
be proclaimed upon the house-tops." In 
a word, our own time — when we are in 
danger of knowing too much and know- 
ing it too soon — is a reaction from the 
a§^ when our ancestors knew too little 
and knew it too late. Instead of the old 
line, "We are the same that our fathers 
have been," veracity compels the substi- 
tution of some equivalent of the German 
proverb, ^^ Das Ei ist kliiger als die Henne^'' 
or the minnow of to-day is wiser than the 
whale of yester-year. In fine, we should 
no longer sigh '^ si la jeunesse savait^'' but 
si la jeunesse ne s avail pas. 

Not only the imaginations of roman- 
cers, but the genuine biographies and con- 

240 



The Lifting of Veils in Literature 

fessions of men and women, tend to make 
us prematurely familiar with ourselves, 
and more especially with our unsaintly 
possibilities. The buds may well be dis- 
couraged from putting forth their petals 
if the vision of the preying worm and 
the sere and yellow leaf— ending in decay 
and dust — is kept too much in evidence. 
For other reasons, there is much cause 
for regret in all this, since a few experi- 
ences and the charm of their discovery 
belong exclusively to one's own biography. 
How ruthless, then, the pen of the novelist 
who gives a three-page description of a 
kiss — thereby robbing some reader of his 
personal right of discovery, and profaning 
the sacred poetry of life into the road- 
side prose of a circus-poster. This may 
seem but a minor offense of the rough- 
handed realist. But, after all, is it so 
minor? Life and love will cease to come 
fresh and beautiful to youth if every sen- 
i6 241 



Why Love Grows Cold 

sation and emotion is to be analyzed and 
placarded. The dreary day may dawn 
when the too well-read man may sigh 
for the early disadvantages of Mowgli 
or the blissful ignorance of the illiterate 
peasant whose own romance is a fresh 
and divine revelation to be held forever 
sacred in the privacy of his own heart. 

Unless tradition and most of our in- 
stincts are at fault, there are a few facts 
which belong to the realm of twilight and 
darkness. Nor can these facts be dragged 
into the garish light of day without violat- 
ing the laws of literary chiaroscuro, not to 
mention ethical considerations still more 
vital. Not the least effective part of any 
theatrical performance is the restful mo- 
ment when the curtain falls. There are 
books, however, that scarcely allow their 
readers any such freedom and rest. The 
curtain no sooner falls on the stage than 
another rises on the actors' dressing-room. 

242 



The Lifting of Veils in Literature 

Unfortunately, authors and publishers 
have discovered that the novel in which 
there are no reserves is the novel which 
sells, though it is only fair to acknowl- 
edge that the best known publishers of 
our country have persisted in issuing only 
uncompromisingly decent books. But 
there is always some publisher who has 
his price, and his financial returns tempt 
other publishers. So it comes to pass 
that there is a steady increase in the pro- 
duction of questionable books, and with 
the publication of every such work arise 
its defenders, ready to crush all objec- 
tions and objectors with stony tables from 
their own little Sinai of art. Meantime, 
the infectious volume goes its way — ^not 
into the hands of the discriminating few 
who are oblivious of everything in it 
save its art — but chiefly into the hands 
of the inquisitive many, who read it for en- 
tirely different reasons, not more esthetic 

243 



Why Love Grows Cold 

and transcendental, we may justly infer, 
than the motives which inspire the readers 
of yellow journals. 

Not even the most belligerent devotee 
of the famous Italian, "who speaks so 
loud one hears him well only at a dis- 
tance," would maintain that it was a 
sudden and overwhelming appreciation of 
that author's art which accounted for the 
enormous sales of his best known novel. 
But granting the existence in that book 
of some very rarefied and sublimated form 
of art — comprehensible only to a highly 
evolved order of intellect — is not the moral 
risk incurred by the great mass of un- 
disceming readers a large price to pay 
for the hypothetical benefit accruing to 
the highly cultured few? Every reader, 
to a greater or less degree, according to 
the power of his imagination, lives through 
in mind the experiences of the characters 
of whom he reads. If those experiences 

244 



The Lifting of Veils in Literature 

are vile and degrading, they as surely 
contaminate the thought as the records 
of noble and heroic deeds stimulate the 
mind to higher endeavor. 

Unluckily, it is true that those who 
would be least injured by pernicious books 
are the ones who have no desire to read 
them — and there are such, let scoffers say 
what they may — who would as deliberately 
wade through a mud-puddle as to read 
a book whose pages were known to con- 
tain impure thoughts and images. To 
be perfectly logical, is there any good 
reason why one should not be as fastidi- 
ous about the company he keeps in books 
as in real life? Why, then, should one 
associate with an ink-begotten hero be- 
yond the page where his communications 
are unsavory, or such as would not be 
tolerated in select circles in real life? But 
with the strange inconsistency of mortals, 
characters, who, in flesh and blood, would 

245 



Why Love Grows Cold 

be ejected from a respectable house by 
primitive methods, when typographically 
incarnated, are coddled in ladies' boudoirs 
in thousands of homes and allowed to 
associate with the younger members of the 
household. 

Not long ago a well-known English 
author, who knows how to write clean 
stories that hold his readers rigid with 
interest, v/rote for a popular magazine 
an article on his "favorite novel." With 
British candor, which might have served 
a better end than to increase the circu- 
lation of the book he singled out, he 
confessed that his favorite was — well, the 
same reason which might have justified 
him in withholding its name will restrain 
the present writer. For the benefit of 
those who have read the book, it may 
be known by these signs : It is chiefly 
celebrated for its indecency, and a some- 
what neatly-turned sentence about a tear 

246 



The Lifting of Veils in Literature 

with which the recording angel blotted 
out the entry of an oath. Hardly a day 
had passed, after the magazine mentioned 
had reached its subscribers, when there 
was a great demand for the favorite book 
of the English novelist. One bright young 
miss, in her teens, could hardly be dis- 
suaded from borrowing it, though she 
was assured that two random pages had 
sufficed her adviser, and two would un- 
doubtedly fill her with such disgust that 
she would never open the book again. 
It is the old story of the Garden of Eden, 
full of all manner of wholesome fruit, 
and Eve "sighing for a knurly pippin," 
which subsequently deprives her of Para- 
dise. 

No one can deny that there are more 
good books than any one man or woman 
can read properly; but from the clamor- 
ous ado that is sometimes made over 
the pippin variety of literature and the 

247 



Why Love Grows Cold 

excessive adulation of some particular 
flavor which an expert taster professes 
to discover in it, one would infer that 
it was the most marvelous growth in the 
whole Eden of Literature. There are 
probably few sentences in the English 
language which have been so extrava- 
gantly lauded as the one penned by 
the very reverend sentimental gusher — of 
whom mention has already been made. 
One cannot help wondering if half as 
much notice would have been taken of 
it had it occurred in a decent book. When 
it is possible to row out in a boat in a 
fresh river and pick all the water-lilies 
we can carry, why should we wade neck- 
deep through a miry bog to pick one, 
different in no respect, save for its slimy 
stem? 

We should indignantly resent the audac- 
ity of one who came into our house and 
hung on our walls pictures that filled us 

248 



The Lifting of Veils in Literature 

with loathing. But the offense of the 
morbid realist, who hangs repulsive pic- 
tures in the mind, is far greater, for these 
cannot be taken down and scarcely may 
be veiled by the merciful years. 

In spite of all quibbling and fencing 
in the name of art, we are facing a grave 
problem in the present tendency on the 
part of authors to write and translate 
books which are known among publishers 
as "off color." There may be no signifi- 
cance in the fact that the nations which 
have produced the most miry master- 
pieces of literature are the most morally 
corrupt nations of the earth, but the fact 
may well justify a little more caution 
on the part of authors, publishers, and 
readers. Now that it is widely under- 
stood that nothing swells the circulation 
of a book so much as qualities which 
challenge its suppression, even the right- 
eous author — especially if there is some 

249 



Why Love Grows Cold 

poverty mingled with his righteousness 
— is sorely tempted to slacken the reins 
of propriety, while second-, third-, and 
fourth-rate authors dispense with reins 
altogether. 

If there were some method of ascertain- 
ing how many sins have never been com- 
mitted simply because they were never 
thought of, and how many sins have been 
due to the suggestions of some abnormal 
author cursed with a corruptly versatile 
imagination, one might begin to measure 
the evil that an evil book can accom- 
plish. Were man not an imitative animal, 
from childhood up, part of the dangers 
of pernicious literature would be lessened. 
But nearly half of the average man's acts 
— good or bad — are performed in an abso- 
lute, though unconscious, mimicry of the 
acts of others, as are the piratical ex- 
ploits of youthful readers of dime novels. 
Those who have made a study of divorce 

250 



The Lifting of Veils in Literature 

statistics assure us that every divorce is 
a suggestion — even a strong hint — to an- 
other divorce, and in States where a be- 
wildering variety of reasons for divorce 
are allowed and flauntingly advertised, 
married people are very noticeably in- 
fluenced by the suggestions in the air 
and gradually come to regard their vows 
as very conditional and brittle bonds, 
which they may snap asunder at the first 
chafing. 

One of Du Manner's Punch cartoons 
portrays an aunt, telling a story to her 
little nephew, winding up with this moral : 
"But, good little Tommy, you never got 
into the bath with all your Sunday clothes 
on, did you?" "No," said little Tommy, 
thoughtfully, "I never did, but I will 
now, though." 

The same contagion of suggestion lurks 
in the experiences recorded in yellow liter- 
ature, and one of the most hopless fea- 

251 



Why Love Grows Cold 

tures of the case is the victim's uncon- 
sciousness of his own demoralization. 
There is — in nearly every instance — a Hter- 
ary nausea Kke that accompanying the 
first experiment with tobacco, which fol- 
lows the first reading of a rank book. 
But with the tenth or twelfth volume of 
the kind, some readers have passed the 
shockable stage. They have seen "the 
thing too much," and find life stale be- 
fore they are out of their twenties. 

"You won't mind it at all after you 
have been in here half an hour," was the 
grimly consoling assurance of the officer 
who accompanied Kennan to a Siberian 
prison, in which the air was so vile that 
the explorer knew no adjective that would 
adequately describe it. Such, in brief, is 
the experience of those who breathe for 
any length of time the air wafted from 
the guano Parnassus of literature. 

Some of its ethical maxims the world 
252 



The Lifting of Veils in Literature 

outgrows, but there are others that are 
as unchangingly true as the simple facts 
of the multiplication table. It was an un- 
derstanding of such facts which inspired 
Paul's counsel to the Philippians — "What- 
soever things are pure, whatsoever things 
are lovely, whatsoever things are of good 
report : if there be any virtue, if there be 
any praise, think on these things." 

The freedom of the press is one of our 
most vaunted blessings. But our boast 
may end in shame if one by one every 
veil that should screen the sanctities of 
life and protect us from a useless reve- 
lation of its atrocities is torn aside. What 
the brown, worm-inhabited earth would 
be without its mantle of grass or snow, 
or the sky without clouds, twilight, or 
darkness, that would existence become 
without reserves, illusions, or ideals. 



253 



OCT 22 1903 



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